MackCollier.com

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Is a Fan the Same Thing as a Brand Advocate?

Most people use the terms interchangeable, but I think they are two separate types of people.  In my mind, fans have a higher level of passion and sense of ownership over a brand.  Both brand advocates and fans want to see their favorite brands succeed, but  I think the difference is that fans will work with the brand to make that happen.

And to be clear, in this context fans are much rarer than brand advocates.  Their level of devotion and passion for the brand also makes them far more special.  In Think Like a Rock Star, the underlying focus of the entire book is to help your brand create a process and framework for connecting with your fans.  And I constantly stress that your brand shouldn’t get hung up on how many (or typically how few) fans you have.  The people that will Like your Facebook page aren’t typically your ‘fans’.

For example, if you join Maker’s Mark’s brand ambassador program, the brand views it as if you are accepting a job.  Your new job is to promote the product to other customers, as well as talk to bars and restaurants and either encourage them to carry it if they are not, and to thank them for carrying it, if they do.  Your job is to be a raving fan of Maker’s Mark.  Now a true fan of the brand will jump at the chance, and the brand’s program has been extremely popular from its onset over a decade ago.

But if you were to look at everyone that Liked your Facebook page or that followed you on Twitter and made them a similar ‘job’ offer, how many would take you up on that offer?  Probably not many.  So if you are a brand, you need to understand that your true fans are pretty rare customers, there’s probably not a lot of them out there.

Still, it’s incredibly powerful to connect with them, because the thing about your fans is:

1 – They have extremely high levels of loyalty.  So high that they will go out and recruit new fans among your existing customers, and attempt to acquire new customers for you.

2 – They have a high sense of ownership over your brand.   For example they will tell you what’s wrong with your brand, then work alongside you to correct it.

3 – They are your best source of marketing.  Your fans can more effectively connect with customers than your brand can because your fans are speaking in a voice that the customer can relate to: Their own.

 

So don’t get caught up in the numbers game, and don’t fret if your brand doesn’t have 50,000 fans, it may only have 50.  The point is to connect with the fans you do have.  If you need the roadmap to get you started identifying who your fans are and how you can connect with them, now it’s available.

PS:  Here’s a freebie from the book:  One way to help identify your fans is by looking for ‘hand-raisers’.  Remember that since your fans feel a sense of ownership over your brand, they will often reach out to you and initiate contact.  Look for people that are emailing you, that are contacting you on Twitter and Facebook, or even writing letters.  If you are a blogger, the reader that emailed you last week to let you know that they loved your latest post and that it resonated with you, they are likely a fan.  They want to connect with you and thank you for what you do.  Your fans have the motivation to connect with you that your ‘brand advocates’ may not.

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5 Blogging Myths That Need to Die a Slow and Terrible Death

If social media has done anything, it has highlighted the fact that we humans love to jump to conclusions.  And we love to latch onto assumptions that validate and agree with our own worldview.  The same thing with blogging, we cling to many ‘truths’ that are in reality, mostly bunk.  Here’s five of them:

1 – Comments are an indicator of how successful your blog is.  Kevin Hillstrom left a comment here earlier this week, so I want to pick on him for a minute.  Here’s how many comments his blog has received so far this year: 30 comments on 33 posts.  Less than 1 comment per post.  So his blog sucks, right?  Here’s the comment Kevin left:

“70% of my annual consulting revenue comes from my blog. I know this, because I ask every CEO who hires me how they found out about me. They tell me that they heard about me via word of mouth (usually from other blog followers), then they read my content for anywhere between 6 months and 3 years before deciding to hire me.

This trend has held constant for all six of the years I’ve done database marketing work for CEOs.

I used to be a VP at Nordstrom, so one can guess that I earn a reasonable living. Multiply that by 0.7, that’s the fraction the blog is responsible for. The blog works wonders for my business.”

Lesson:  Engagement can be a sign of successful content, but only if that engagement helps you reach your blogging goals.  Now some bloggers like Gini Dietrich claim they get many of their customers from people they connect with after they leave comments on their blog.  I can totally see that, but you shouldn’t assume that simply getting comments means your blog is successful.  More comments is only a sign of success if it is helping you reach your larger goals for your blog.

2 – If you build it, they will come (AKA, Great Content Gets Found).  Not complete bullshit, but it’s close.  Even if you are an amazing writer and create amazing content, that content still has to get found.  Now the ‘Content is King’ proponents will argue that great content always gets found.  And it usually does, what they won’t tell you is that it might take weeks, months or even years for this to happen.  We all have far more information coming at us than we can process.  Go to Twitter right now and you’ll see a steady stream of links being shared back and forth.  How is your amazing content going to stand out in that crowd?

Lesson:  You get out of blogging what you put into it.  If you want your content to be found, then you need to get off your blog and interact with people in their space. Now this isn’t an absolute, because you can always make the argument that blog content can be found via search.  But in general, you can greatly increase the chance of your blog being discovered if you are interacting with your potential readers in their space.  Leave comments on industry blogs, participate in twitter chats about the same topics that your blog covers.  Don’t be lazy and wait to be discovered, get off the couch and in the game.

3 – You Shouldn’t Blog Until You Have Something to Say.  The people telling you this are typically the guys that blog 5 times a year.  They will also tell you that there’s so much noise now that you shouldn’t contribute to it by creating more blogging blather.  My gut feeling is that most of these bloggers aren’t trying to convince you that it’s ok to blog less, they are trying to convince themselves.

Lesson:  As I have been harping on here this year, you become a better blogger by blogging.  The ‘I shouldn’t blog until I have something to say’ line can become an excuse you use to not make the time to blog.  I know from my own experiences that the more I blog, the easier it becomes.  I can blog once a week and spend roughly the same amount of time on that 1 post as I do blogging 4-5 times a week.  Why?  Because when I blog more often, I can more easily spot blogging ideas.  Writing is like anything else, the more you do it and the more frequently you do it, the easier it becomes.

4 – Blogging is dead and social media has killed it.  Ah yes the ‘blogging is dead!’ proclamation.  I think I first started hearing this around 2008 when Twitter started taking off.  This one is easy to fall for, especially if you are a business.  You see that Facebook has 5 billion members and your blog gets 5 visitors a month, and think that’s where you need to be.  But in home-buying terms, with Facebook you are renting, with your blog, you ‘own’ it.  So if the landlord (Facebook) decides to change the rules on you, you can be in big trouble.  But with a blog, you own that space.  You can create the type of content you want, and run promotions and contests.  Plus, the search benefits of blogging speak for themselves.

Lesson: Although blogging is a lot of work, it also has many natural advantages that socnets can’t match.  But you need to decide if blogging is right for your individual needs.  If your customers are using search as a research tool before they make a purchase, then a blog will definitely help you reach potential customers.

5 – If you haven’t started blogging by now, you’ve missed the boat.  Yeah I was hearing this same thing in 2010 and 2008.  The fact is, it’s probably easier for a great writer to stand out now because truly original voices are becoming harder to find.  Even many of the blogging trailblazers are changing their methods to be more like larger websites, more homogenized.  Truly unique voices and approaches will always stand out.

Lesson:  It’s never too late to share your voice.  I started blogging in 2005.  There were already a lot of well-established bloggers by then.  But every year since, a few new bloggers have come ‘out of no where’ and suddenly everyone loves them.  There is always room for smart people with something valuable to say, don’t let a late start keep you from having a start.

What’s the biggest blogging myth that you wish would go away?

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The One Simple Change That Dropped My Blog’s Traffic By 25%

Two weeks ago I wrote a pretty popular blog post on whether or not bloggers should include dates on their posts.  There was plenty of support both for having and removing dates from posts.

Now at that time, I did not include dates on my posts.  But since one of my mantras is that bloggers should test things for themselves with their blogs, I decided to add back the dates to posts for the rest of the month, and then report back my results.

Today it’s been 2 weeks since I added back dates to my posts, and I just took them back off.  I think this picture of my statistics over the last 30 days explains why (the blue X is the day that I added dates back to the posts):

Yep.  As soon as I added dates back to the posts, the overall traffic here started falling.  Quite sharply, as you can see.

Now as part of this, I said I’d look at how search traffic and referral traffic from Twitter was impacted.  Let’s first look at search:

The blue X is on the 14th.  The next day, the 15th, was actually the best day ever for search traffic.  But as you can see, it starts falling pretty sharply after that.  Overall, search traffic fell about 25% over the last 2 weeks.  And given that search traffic drives about 57% of the traffic to this blog, that’s a big hit.

Traffic from Twitter was down a bit as well, but not quite as much:

 Twitter traffic was down about 25% the first week after I added back dates, then another 15% the second week.

Does all this prove that your search and Twitter traffic will fall sharply if you put dates on your posts?  Nope, it does suggest that you should test both with and without dates before you decide.  That’s why I am always harping on testing this stuff, from now on if anyone asks me if it’s better to have dates on their posts or not, I can answer with ‘All I can tell you is that my search and Twitter traffic fell by about 25% when I added dates to my posts.  But you should test it on your blog.’

So why don’t you test this on your blog?  Pick the first two weeks of February, and take dates off your posts if you have them on now, and add them back if you have taken them off.  Track the changes.  I am going to keep doing that, if my search and Twitter traffic now returns to where it was before the 14th, I will be almost positive that adding dates was the culprit.

Never assume when you can test.

UPDATE: There’s been a few people here and elsewhere criticizing the methodology used here, whether or not the test period was long enough, etc.  I don’t want y’all to get hung up on the validity (yay or nay) of the test itself, but instead focus on the fact that I did test.  I don’t want your takeaway from reading this post to be that you should remove dates from your blog if you want to see traffic go up.  The takeaway should be that you should test this on your blog, and not accept my advice or any other blogger’s.  We learn by doing for ourselves, not by blindly following other bloggers.  Either way, test it on your blog then you will know for sure.

SECOND UPDATE(2-5-2013):  Here’s a screenshot I took of this blog’s traffic for the last 30 days, as of yesterday.  The blue X was on the 14th, and that was the day I added dates back to the posts here.  You can then see what happened to traffic levels for the next 2 weeks.  The red X was on Jan 28th, and that was the day on which I took the dates back off.  I think the immediate rise in traffic tells the tale.  But again, don’t assume, test for yourself on your own blog.

SearchStats5

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Ignore the Haters

It’s such a privilege to be a part of #Blogchat every Sunday night.  The community there is incredibly supportive and helpful.  People go out of their way to greet you when you arrive, and to help you in any way they can.  Especially newbies and people that are joining for the first time.

However, and I believe partly because of the supportive community #Blogchat has, it does attract a few ‘haters’.  People that try to tell bloggers that they need to stop blogging.  That there are too many blogs, that people don’t need to blog about every little thing that comes into their minds.  Basically, they spend the majority of their time telling other bloggers how they are doing it wrong.

These bloggers are the ones doing it wrong.  They are the haters.  The people that can’t understand why their blog isn’t more active, why their traffic isn’t going up.  So instead of trying to contribute to a helpful community, they bash.  It’s as if they seem to believe that telling someone else what’s wrong with their blog, will make them feel better about their own blogging efforts.

Ignore the haters.  When is the last time you saw a truly successful blogger waste her time going around telling other bloggers how they are doing it wrong?  Exactly, the most successful bloggers are usually the ones that go out of their way to help other bloggers, not hinder them.

The people that care will tell you what you are doing wrong, and then show you how to fix it.  The assholes will just tell you you are wrong then leave.

Ignore the assholes.  You are the only person that decides whether or not you can succeed at blogging or anything else in life.

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The Art of Book Marketing and the One Thing Many Authors Miss

Think Like a Rock Star is now less than three months from hitting stores.  So as you might guess, these last few months have been a crash course for me in how to effectively market a book and help it be successful.

Most of the information I’ve found and advice I’ve received from other authors has focused on The Launch.  The idea is to sell as many copies of your book as possible into a small concentrated window, typically the week that your book comes out.  You want to sell as many copies as possible during that launch week because typically those bestseller lists from sources like The New York Times and others reset each week.  And focusing in sales on that one-week launch period might be the difference between forever being known as a published author, and being a New York Times Bestselling author.  For the author, it’s a really huge deal.

So as you might expect, I’ve got a ton of stuff planned to help Think Like a Rock Star have as successful of a launch as possible.  And over the next few weeks I will be asking for your help in seeing that successful launch take place.

But the thing about a book launch is that it’s mostly focused on what’s best for the author.  As I was researching this, I realized there was a parallel to my book, in that really the launch is all about acquiring new customers.  Getting as many new sales as possible so that it helps the book’s ability to hit all those bestseller lists and all that jazz.  So in a way, if I strictly focused my book’s marketing on The Launch, I was really undermining one of the core lessons of Think Like A Rock Star.

Focus on  New Customers or Existing Fans?

The thing that really separates rock stars from most brands is who they market to.  While most companies focus on acquiring new customers, most rock stars focus on delighting their existing fans.  Rock stars focus most of their time and energy on connecting with their existing customers, not their new ones.

This prompted me to rethink my marketing plan for this book a bit.  There’s no doubt that The Launch is insanely huge to a book’s eventual success.  But in my opinion, even more important than marketing to new customers is finding ways to support your existing readers.

So over the next few weeks while I prep for the book’s launch, I will also be launching some efforts to support the readers of this book.  For example, starting within the next 7-10 days, I will be launching an email newsletter to compliment the book.  This newsletter will also be a tool to help readers learn how their businesses can better connect with their fans.  It will be an ongoing effort, and it will provide the most value to people after they buy the book.  I also have a couple of other projects that I’m not ready to announce yet.

But for now, I am going to end this post by asking for your help.  If you have or did buy Think Like a Rock Star, what could I offer you after your purchase to help support your brand’s efforts to better connect with its fans?  Maybe a place where readers could connect and get advice from me and each other?  Or what have other authors done for his/her readers that you really liked, that added value to you as a reader?

I saw where someone, I think it was Seth Godin, said that one of the best reasons to write a book was to start a conversation.  That was really the driving force for me to write Think Like a Rock Star, I wanted to start a conversation about how companies can better understand who their fans are, and connect with them.  Part of that conversation is finding ways to support the people that want to find ways to do just that for their companies.

What are your thoughts?  What could I do as an author to create more value for you as a reader after you buy the book?

PS: I’ve started sending out copies of Think Like a Rock Star to a few colleagues and I recently got feedback on the book from Paper.li’s Community Manager, Kelly Hungerford.  Here’s what Kelly thought:  “Simple, jargon-free and true to Mack Collier’s authentic style, this book explains exactly why your brand need fans and not customers, and how you can turn your most enthusiastic ones into powerful brand advocates.  Mack delivers his passion for brand advocacy, knowledge of customer-centric marketing and in-depth understanding of what makes the most devoted of fans tick in a language we can all relate to: rock stars and fans.

I love this this book for many reasons, but mostly because that for every “why” in this book, there is a “how” to back it up! The case studies, tips and social media advice are perfectly aligned with Mack’s underlying mission of helping brands understand the true value of their most passionate customers. It’s a must read for modern day marketers and I highly recommend you purchase two copies: one for you and one for your team.”

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You Learn How to Be a Better Blogger By Doing, Not By Listening

I have a love/hate relationship with list posts.  On the one hand, those ’10 Steps to Launching a Business Blog’ or ‘5 Ways to Improve Your Blogging Today’ posts are always popular.  I know, cause I’ve written plenty of them.   And even though a lot of bloggers don’t like them, they do help bloggers get started tackling their problems.

And that’s where the hate part of my relationship kicks in.  I hate that too many bloggers follow ‘list’ posts to the letter, and that’s it.  Those list posts work great if you view them as a starting point and an example of how you could improve.  They aren’t the end-all-be-all of the blogging experience.

The only way to truly improve as a blogger is by blogging.  At some point you have to stop looking for everyone else to give you the answers, and you have to go out and break stuff.  I can tell you what has worked for me, and I have good insights into what will likely work for you.  But I can’t guarantee anything, and neither can you.

For example, about a week ago I posted here about whether or not blog posts should have dates on them.  There was plenty of support for both sides of the issue.  I made the point at the time that the only way each of us would know for sure how adding or removing dates from our posts affected our blog was to do it.  So I added dates back to the posts here, and started tracking changes in my search and referral traffic from Twitter.  I told everyone I’d do that through the rest of the month.  So far, traffic from both sources is down, and if this continues I will take dates back off at the end of the month.

But the key thing is, now I know.  I didn’t just read what other bloggers were writing on the topic and accept their experiences as my own.  I am testing it on my blog.

This is a big reason why we were so passionate about structuring BlogHOT as a learning environment.  We didn’t want to just create a conference where attendees were lectured at all day then went home.  We wanted them to be doing stuff and interacting with each other and learning how to do this blogging stuff for themselves.

Because when it comes to blogging, you learn by doing, not by listening.

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Hobbies, Deeper Learning and the One Thing You May Not Know About Scott Monty

If I asked you about Scott Monty, you’d probably offer up that he’s the Global Head of Social Media for Ford.  Everyone knows that. But did you also know that Scott is a huge Sherlock Holmes fan and has one of the best hobby blogs I’ve ever seen, The Baker Street Blog?

Last night during #Blogchat while we were discussing creating more advanced content on our blogs, a few of you correctly pointed out that people that run hobby blogs are extremely passionate about their hobbies.  They have the desire to find that more advanced content, because they have a passion to learn more about their hobby.

For example, I am a huge fan of the classic tv sitcom MASH.  I have a friend that is as well, but he takes it to another level.  What he does is collect autographs from the cast members.  And not just the main characters like Hawkeye and Frank Burns, he especially goes after the actors that only appeared in one or two episodes.  The more obscure the better.  He spends hours hunting down names and addresses, and knows all the autograph sites and MASH sites to find this information (started by people that are just as passionate as he is).

Our passion drives us to learn more about the topics we are passionate about.

Not only does it drive us to learn more about the topics we are passionate about, it drives is to connect with others that know more than we do.  We are constantly driven to learn more about the topics we are passionate about, and we want to connect with others that share our passion and we want to discuss that passion with others.  Because as Kathy Sierra puts it ‘people with a passion for something will not STFU!’

So how do you focus on the topics that your audience is passionate about?  Let’s say you blog about….blogging.  Most people I know are not passionate about blogging as a tool, they are passionate about what the tool allows them to do.  For example, maybe they are blogging to improve their chances of getting a job.  Maybe they are blogging to share their passion for their favorite brand.  Maybe they are blogging to connect with other people that are dealing with an extremely rare disease.  Whatever their area of passion is, it typically is not about the blog as a tool, but what the blog allows them to do.

One final thought on passion: Learning feeds passion.  As we learn more about a topic, we feel we are getting better at that topic.  Maybe we start studying the Civil War.  First we learn the causes of the war.  Then we move on and learn about the major battles, the major generals.  Before you know it we are dissecting whether or not Robert E Lee’s battleplan at Gettysburg didn’t work because it was a terrible plan, or because it was a great plan that was poorly executed due to the incompetence of his generals.

So as a blogger, if you can help you audience learn more about a topic they love, they will not only become more passionate about it, they will become more passionate about you.

PS: Just as I was finishing this post, Kelly left this comment on yesterday’s post – “I believe inspiration is a large part of the education process, regardless if it is beginning or advanced level.  I look to be inspired and even when I’m just starting out on my new journey I look to mentors who can help solve my problems or answer questions now, as well as inspire me in the future. I want to grow with them.”

Double PS: Here’s an oldie but a goodie from Kathy on creating more engaging content for your audience.

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Creating Advanced Content and the Role of Deeper Discussions on Blogs

If you think about it, one of the fastest ways to truly establish thought leadership with a blog is to continuously create high-level content around a subject.  Yet very few blogs do that, and the ones that offer high level content on a frequent basis typically have a very infrequent posting schedule.

Does that mean that most people are simply incapable of creating more advanced content?  I say no, and offer two reasons why most bloggers aren’t creating more advanced content:

1 – Saying ‘Here’s What I Think’ can be scary.  When you write more advanced content, you are often ceding the role of expert and acknowledging to your readers that you don’t have all the answers.  That can be very scary for some people.

2 – More advanced content typically gets less engagement.  THIS is the biggest reason I believe why most of the content we see in this space is 101-level, and not 301 or 401 level.  In general, basic content gets shared, more advanced content gets mulled over.  And just like the blogger can get skittish about admitting that they don’t have all the answers, so can the reader when they go to leave a comment.

 

So at the end of the day, how do we as bloggers create more advanced content on our blogs?  That’s the topic I want to discuss tonight at #Blogchat (8pm Central time, Sunday night).  But before we chat about it tonight, I want to offer one example of how we can do that on our blogs, and it ties back to a method I actually use during #Blogchat:

Create more advanced content by first creating deeper discussions. 

First, if you’ll notice the majority of the topics we cover at #Blogchat are more 101-level.  There’s a reason for this, as stated above, 101-level content lowers the participation barrier.  When the topic level is 101-level, it’s easy for more people to feel like they are an expert, and thus they feel more comfortable joining the discussion.

The simple fact is that most people, especially regular participants of #Blogchat, are completely capable of engaging in and contributing to more advanced conversations.  But many people don’t believe they are, and I think it’s the job of the host (whether on Twitter or a blog) to bring out deeper thoughts from participants.  This is something I don’t do very well.

So I will save the rest for tonight at #Blogchat, but if you will be joining us (thank you!), please be thinking about ways that we all can create more advanced content.  And at the same time, how can we create more advanced discussions around our content?

See y’all at 8pm Central!

Pic via Flickr user Appalachian Encounters

PS:  If you want to leave comments here now, please do and we can carry the conversation over to #blogchat when it starts tonight!

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You Build Loyalty and Create Fans With Rewards

It’s the timing and context of the reward that’s crucial.

If you walk into Best Buy and the door greeter smiles and hands you a coupon for 20% off any purchase over $100 during your visit, that’s not a reward.  It’s an incentive to make a purchase.  While that coupon might increase the chance that you will make a purchase during that trip to Best Buy, in the grand scheme of things it’s probably not going to make you more loyal to the chain.

If you walk into your favorite antique mall and the owner greets you and says “BTW, do you still need that final glass to complete your Pepsi collection from 1975?  Because we just bought a large collection of glassware and I found it and put it aside to ask you about the next time you came in.  Here you go!”  That’s a true reward because it comes as a result of previous purchases and isn’t directly tied to a future purchase.

Above that, this type of reward communicates appreciation to the customer for their business.  That builds loyalty because the business is literally saying Thank You.

The Best Buy example communicates a desire to have you buy something.   So even though you are getting a coupon, you understand that Best Buy is acting in its best interest.  And yes, the antique shop owner is also acting in their best interest by giving you the Pepsi glass you need, because they could sell that to someone else.  So it is worth money to the owner, but the owner also understands the value that you place on this item.  It’s the final glass you need to complete a collection that you’ve been assembling for 10 years!

So if you are wanting to offer rewards that also build loyalty, focus on ways to reward existing behavior versus trying to incentivize new behavior.

Now, what about loyalty punch cards?  You’ve probably seen these at restaurants, coffee shops and the like.  Buy 5/10 meals, get one free.  Is that what we mean by building loyalty by rewarding after the purchase?

No, because even though the reward comes after the purchase, there’s an incentive to make the next purchase.  So really, punch cards like this are building loyalty to the offer, not the brand.  For example, let’s say it’s your lunch hour and you are about to run to Subway, when you remember that you have a Pizza Hut lunch buffet punch card, and that with one more punch you card will be full and you’ll get a free meal.  That will probably swing your lunch decision to Pizza Hut, but what happens next week when your Pizza Hut punch card is empty?  Will there still be the same level of incentive to start a new punch card, or will you then decide to go to Subway for lunch?

Remember, the timing and context of the reward is crucial to building loyalty.  It determines if you are saying ‘Thank you!’ for existing behavior, or attempting to create new behavior.

Also, when a business shows you that they appreciate your business, it validates your loyalty to them.  It makes you feel better about supporting them, and it does become an incentive to make an additional purchase.

But the incentive doesn’t come from the brand, it comes from you.  We all want to support the brands that we feel appreciate us and act in our best interests, as well as their own.  There’s a feeling of ‘well they did something for me, now I want to do something for them!’

You don’t get that with coupons and incentives, because we understand that the brand is offering these to entice sales.  Which means its motivation lies in its own best interests.

You build loyalty by offering the reward after and independently of the purchase.  Not by offering it before and tying it to a purchase.

PS: In the above picture the incentive is obvious but the reward might not be.  On June 13th, 2010, Taylor Swift held a special free autograph signing for her fans in Nashville.  She started signing at 8am in the morning, and finally stopped at 10:30PM that night.  This was one of the many ways that Taylor says Thank You to her fans for their existing behavior.   And it’s one of the many reasons why they love her.

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My Posts Have An Average Lifespan of 2-3 Days on Twitter

I was digging through this blog’s stats this morning in Google Analytics, and I noticed something interesting.  As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, one of my goals for 2013 is to blog more often.  A big reason why is because I want to increase the traffic here, and so far in January traffic is up a bit, and that’s to be expected from a more frequent posting pattern.

So what I want to do as the traffic increases is understand which traffic sources are driving that increase.  One of them is Twitter, which is by far the social site that sends me the most referral traffic.  I started looking at the individual posts in 2013 that have received the most traffic from Twitter, and I noticed something:  They received almost all of their referral traffic from Twitter in the first 2-3 days, then almost nothing.

Here’s the number of Twitter referrals for the most popular post so far this month, ‘Done’ is Better Than ‘Perfect’ When it Comes to Blogging, which was published on Jan 1st:

As you can see, good for 3 days, then traffic volume falls off a cliff.

Here’s the traffic pattern for the 3rd most popular post (#2 was one that I linked to for multiple days as a #blogchat topic and it skewed the results a bit I think), which was The Biggest Mistake Companies Make When Engaging Their Fans Via Social Media published on Jan 8th:

Same pattern, traffic for 3 days, then it dies.  There was a bump back on the 14th, and that was the same day the post was listed as a link on a New York Times article and a few people RTed the post on Twitter, I am assuming after they found it via the NYT link.

Finally, here’s the 4th most popular post, Should You Remove the Dates From Your Blog Posts?, on Jan 14th:

Two days, then flatline.

There’s a few takeaways I have from this:

1 – These stats suggest that when we are on Twitter, links have a very short window to get our attention.  I don’t think that’s a huge revelation.

2 – If we want to leverage Twitter as a platform to draw attention to our writings, then it pays to focus on fewer topics versus more.  If we are only paying attention in short bursts on Twitter, then it helps if you are consistently giving us the same or similar topics to look at.

3 – Since our attention spans are so short, it means we can cover the same topics repeatedly.  This is where I think you can really leverage Twitter as a channel to drive big referral traffic back to your blog.  By blogging frequently, and by frequently blogging about the same or similar topics.  Notice from the above graphs that the 3 posts were published on the 1st, the 8th and the 14th.  Pretty spread out, but what if those same posts were published three days in a row?  The spike in traffic from each would overlap and by the 2nd and 3rd days, referral traffic as a whole from Twitter would be pretty high.

4 – If you plan on having Twitter be a driver of traffic to your blog, you probably need to publish a new post at least every 2-3 days.  If we assume that the average blog post has a lifespan of 2-3 days on Twitter, publishing a new blog post every month isn’t going to do much for your referral traffic from the site.

So that’s something to think about.  I think for me what I would like to see happen is to find a way to not only extend that average lifespan to say 3-4 days, but to also chain together posts that bring in higher amounts of referral traffic from Twitter on a more regular basis.

I would also be interested in hearing what the rest of you are seeing with the referral traffic from Twitter to your posts.  Are you seeing most of your traffic coming in the first 2-3 days as well?  Do you see a longer range?  Shorter?