How to Twitter-spread your blog to 20,000+ in less than 2 days

Following my blog article on how to make your blog go viral with help of retweets, and analyzing the exposure it got in the Twittersphere, I can now show you how strong the power of retweets really can be and how fast it can spread your message to thousands of people. Twitter viral marketing case study with facts.

My tweet

I tweeted my article 3 times to my followers during a 24 hour period after my article was published. I also had the “tweet this” link I made myself at the end of the article.  That was my part of the promotion. The rest was done by the readers.

21 retweets of my original tweet or the “tweet this” link to a total of 7629 followers.  According to Tweetburner, http://twurl.nl/kpkz48 link had 404 clicks in total.

Interesting thing to note is the shape of these retweets. Some are just copy/paste, some are retweets of a retweet, some are written from scratch. As you can see you can expect your message to be spread in many different forms.

Also each of my tweets seems to have gotten attention and was followed by new wave of retweets. It just shows the importance of tweeting your article several times to optimize the exposure. Twitter is so big and noisy that people do not mind you tweeting your article more than once, and not many will see the same tweet as they probably are not on Twitter 24 hours in a row.

Also note that 7 of the retweets include the text I had in my “tweet this link” in my article, so it does seem to work and people do seem to like the convenience of only clicking a link and having the ready-to-tweet text message in their Twitter text field so they just have to click the send button to tweet it.

Twitter_Tips

Another retweet came from Twitter_Tips, they retweeted my article with their own URL  shortener to 7343 followers. Their tweet was retweeted by 2 people to a total of 1234 followers. So in total Twitter_Tips helped me reaching another 8577 twitterers. Unfortunately I do not have access to stats on how many clicks this tweet received.

Joel Drapper

The third wave came from Joel Drapper who created another URL shortener for my article and tweeted it to his 4688 followers. His tweet was retweeted twice to 258 followers. So in total Joel helped spread my URL to 4946 twitterers. According to Tweetburner Joel’s URL to my article got 79 clicks.

The_Gman

Another wave came when The_gman with 808 followers tweeted that he just commented on my post and his tweet got retweeted by 3 twitterers and that in total exposed my article to another 2277 twitterers. Unfortunately I do not have access to stats on how many clicks this tweet received.

In total, these 31 readers retweeted my blog post title, my URL and in most cases my Twitter username to 23,429 followers. In many different forms and shapes and with 4 different URL shorteners. The two URL’s I can track show a total of 483 clicks to my site.

I did not read any case studies on “email a friend” button that many bloggers feature on their posts, but I hope that this post argues enough that “tweet this” button should replace “email this” on all blogs.  It is so much better,  so much easier, so much faster and has the potential for huge exposure compared to the “email this” button.

Simple 5 steps for getting your article go viral on Twitter

My strategy for making my blog post go viral on Twitter can be explained in 5 simple steps:

  1. Be active on Twitter and work on increasing your Twitter followers
  2. Publish interesting article
  3. Include “tweet this” link at the end of the article
  4. Tweet your article to your followers
  5. Let your readers do the rest

Good luck and hopefully your blog post will go viral soon as well!

Twitter Marketing E-Book

For much more information on Twitter, check out my “Twitter Marketing E-book: How to go viral on Twitter“. The e-book includes all the tips on how I use Twitter to build my authority, drive traffic to my blog and get customers. Enjoy twittering!

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    • Post written by Marko Saric on January 15, 2009 in Twitter Marketing

    { 22 comments… read them below or add one }

    1 LemonPoof January 15, 2009 at 5:39 pm

    I missed the original article and Tweet .. but caught this one.. thanks for the info. strainght forward and no fluff :)

    Reply

    2 vivek January 15, 2009 at 6:40 pm

    You seem to have really mastered the Twittersphere.
    20,000+ links without lifting a finger for it.
    Great. Your articles on Twitter are really wonderful and probably the best.

    Reply

    3 Scott Williams January 15, 2009 at 7:04 pm

    The Power of Twitter! Please RT :-) LOL

    Reply

    4 Tracy O'Connor January 15, 2009 at 8:08 pm

    How neat! It seems like most of my readers don’t use Twitter yet, so I’m wondering how useful this will be for me, but it couldn’t hurt to try, either.

    Reply

    5 Marko January 16, 2009 at 12:06 am

    Thanks for the comments!

    @Tracy O’Connor – If your readers do not use Twitter, you can still go on Twitter, get new followers there, tweet interesting content and that way get new visitors, which then will be able to retweet your content which will help you get new followers/visitors and so on in a circle.

    Reply

    6 Joel Drapper January 16, 2009 at 12:45 am

    Hay, I’m famous! Thanks for the mention ;)

    Sorry if I was an inconvenience using another url shortner :P

    I actually have twitterfeed set up with my google reader shared items so it’s one click from google reader to tweet my favourite posts.

    Reply

    7 Man Overboard January 16, 2009 at 1:46 am

    Your case studies make for excellent posts, Marko. The play by play on how your article went viral shows just how quickly Twitter can expand your exposure. Now if I could just get the rest of the Babelers to Tweat…

    Reply

    8 Gerald Weber January 16, 2009 at 2:42 am

    There is definitely great power in the retweet. Impressive stats!

    Reply

    9 David Leonhardt January 16, 2009 at 8:25 pm

    This works wonders for articles on how to make Twitter work for you. You’re playing to the ultimate captive audience. It works for other topics, too, but don’t expect the same results.

    Reply

    10 Marko January 16, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    @David – Great point! I would think as Twitter becomes more mainstream, other topics will become tweetable too. So soon it will all be about writing great content, being very targeted with people you follow on Twitter, and also having as many followers as possible that are interested in your blog topic. Then even blog posts about different subjects will be able to go viral.

    Reply

    11 Rowell Dionicio January 17, 2009 at 6:32 pm

    Success! Quite an invaluable Twitter tip there. I’m bookmarking both posts so I may also experiment!

    Reply

    12 Dr Charles Parker January 17, 2009 at 8:20 pm

    Marko-
    Just how many atmospheres of pressure do I need to decompress from this wonderful dive?

    Switching to WordPress soon, really appreciate this terrific overview from the multiple tweetmeisters!

    Sending this out to my list right now… decompression may take a week.
    cp

    Reply

    13 B February 2, 2009 at 5:17 am

    Impressive stats. I guess I’m missing the real power of Twitter for viral marketing but you’ve just given me an idea of what to do next.

    Yan

    Reply

    14 taolaga February 3, 2009 at 4:52 am

    I want to say: Thanks for this tips
    It’s very helpful for newbie in twitter :)

    Reply

    15 Giles Dawe March 22, 2009 at 4:51 pm

    But what would be the point of getting so many followers? I heard Seth Godin’s post, that it doesn’t mean anything..a la facebook.

    Reply

    16 Marko Saric March 22, 2009 at 8:36 pm

    @Giles Dawe – Each of your Twitter followers is a potential visitor, potential subscriber, potential customer. I am not sure why Seth Godin would say something like that.

    Reply

    17 Daniel Richard March 26, 2009 at 12:45 pm

    Called in here via your article on WTD. Awesome post I have to say. :)

    Reply

    18 BMM March 28, 2009 at 9:20 pm

    Twitter is the marketers wave to the future! Learning so much here reading your posts!
    I’ll write some good articles to Tweet & Retweet!

    Reply

    19 Lisa April 7, 2009 at 4:16 am

    I am learning so much about Twittering on this blog and loving every minute of it. I can’t wait to add the “tweet this post” plugin for Wordpress. Thank you.

    Reply

    20 Satya May 30, 2009 at 10:01 am

    Go TWITTER-POWER!

    enjoying the content…even in may…keep it going

    Reply

    21 Avery July 3, 2009 at 11:34 pm

    that's very nice,but I also heard that the link from Twitter is nofollow.

    Reply

    22 Deal Gal November 10, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    Many thanks for the tips. A very useful post for a Twitter beginner such as myself.

    Reply

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