How to Build Traffic from Twitter / X

Twitter/X is an awesome networking tool. I find it the easiest for follow-ups, quick touch-base messages, and relationship-building. But how easy is it to build traffic with Twitter?

It appears it’s not that easy! I don’t get too many clicks even on Tweets that got tons of engagement.

So how to build traffic from Twitter? 

1. Tag Your URLs

That is important as otherwise, you may not even know how much traffic you receive.

The best way is to use UTM tags: Keep the medium as social and the source as Twitter. Other parameters are up to you.

2. “Hijack” Hashtags

You can start posting relevant tweets with links whenever you know there is an event and when you know it’s a hashtag.

You can even automate that process with Hootsuite or Buffer. Observe what hashtags will be popular, prepare a CSV file, and schedule with Hootsuite.

Keep in mind hashtags should be relevant to your content, naturally.

3. Use Viral Content Bee!

Viral Content Bee helps bring your content in front of Twitter users who are eager to discover more relevant content to share. The platform screens all Twitter accounts making sure they are real and have a solid following on Twitter.

4. Use URL Shorteners That Bring Clicks to Your Site

If you re-post content from other sources, always add a call-to-action. That way posted content will be working for you delivering some clicks to the website you placed in the call-t- action generated by Snip.ly

It’s really a win-win: You promote other people’s content and you get some clicks too!

5. Work on the Quality of Your Twitter Feed and Interact

Acting alone won’t get you far on Twitter. You need to make like-minded friends who will become your personal fans and amplify the reach of your content. If someone stumbles over your profile/feed, show your best side:

1. Impressive Twitter profile: Professional images and to-the-point bio that although clear also shows your personality
2. Impressive Twitter feed.

Make sure your Twitter feed is top-notch quality:

• Curate quality content that is *different* from what everyone’s sharing. Basically, you need to get out of the echo chamber. (To find quality articles on my topics that are different from what others are sharing I often check the articles those popular articles are linking to.)

• Share your posts only if you are sure they are of good quality.

• Share your posts with different images and messages.

• Let your personality show. So many Twitter feeds sound robotic. People find a human voice to be a breeze of fresh air.

Take initiative and interact with real people as much as you can:

• Leave comments on other people’s tweets if you have something to say.

• Retweet with adding your own thoughts to show that you read the article or compliment the author if you were really impressed.

• When you share an article, mention the author, not the website.

• Answer/retweet survey even from people you don’t know. (This and the conversation that happened afterwards got me a loyal fan and subscriber, and an upcoming backlink).

• Come up with some unusual way to get into conversation with your peers and influencers, and make it your thing:

It’s really not about numbers. A person who has 300 followers may do more for your traffic or website in general as the person with 20k followers. It’s about what your relationship with this person is, whether their audience is also your audience, and how engaged their audience is.

Meaningful interaction is the key:

• Interact with people on Twitter. This means responding to their tweets (like you would on Facebook), favoriting tweets, retweeting/quoting, etc.
• Be discriminating. In other words, if you find that interacting and engaging with a Twitter user is working, then continue to do so and also visit their links, comment on their blog posts, etc. But, at the same time, if you find that you are not getting a response from someone, discontinue your engagement with that person and move on to the next person. You need to spend your time wisely (speaking from experience!) and so engage with those who follow a likewise engagement with you.

6. Use Tweet Rotating Tools

• The free WordPress plugin “Revive Old Post” automatically tweets out my old blog posts onto my Twitter profile every 8 hours. This ensures that my website gets a steady flow of traffic from Twitter and brings new visitors to old posts that I wrote years ago. I also get to engage my followers without any effort. You can use [From my archives] disclaimer in these tweets to warn your followers these are older blog posts.
• Another tool to mention here is @drumupio. You can add your articles into its library and one-click schedule any of them to be tweeted multiple times in the coming days and months. All you need to do is to select how many times and how often you need it to be tweeted
• Social Juke Box is another great tool here. Create a box, put your blog posts these and set up how often you want them tweeted. The box will start from start once it tweets all its articles. You can see when your tweets are set to go live in the “Visual schedule”.
• MeetEdgar is a tool for automatically repetitive Twitter updates. The difference between this tool and Buffer (which I was earlier relying on heavily), was that MeetEdgar has a library into which we can pack our updates for Twitter into convenient categories. We can then schedule the frequency and updates to Twitter (and also to Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) according to whatever is an optimal scheduling for each social channel. We can also schedule which category of our library of tweets should go out to Twitter at which times. I usually schedule 24 tweets a day, one every half an hour round the clock. I mix up my libraries of tweets to get a good mix of curated updates plus my own blog post promotional updates. MeetEdgar then cyclically publishes whatever is in its libraries at any given time (as per set frequency/library/times of day) … so all the updates we have ever created so far and will continue to create in the future will forever be cycling through Twitter. This ensures that even old blog posts get repeated exposure as the new ones do.

Takeaways:

Whether you are marketing an existing business or starting an online boutique, Twitter/X is still a valuable source of traffic.

• Use UTM tags to track and analyze Twitter traffic to your website for better optimization. The tags allow you to see campaign source, medium, etc.
• Strategically “hijack” relevant trending hashtags with your tweets to put your content in front of more users. Schedule and automate tweets via tools.
• Prioritize quality engagement over number of followers. Identify and interact consistently with users whose audiences match yours.
• Curate and share unique, high-quality content that stands out from the echo chamber. Check linked articles from popular posts.
• Use tools like Revive Old Post and Social Juke Box to automatically recycle old tweets and blog posts. Brings new eyeballs to old content.
• Shorten URLs with tools like Snip.ly that let you insert calls-to-action, bringing more clicks from shared content.

The key is thoughtful engagement and positioning quality content strategically with the help of automation tools. This ultimately drives more referral traffic from Twitter to your sites.