My Crack at Associated Content's Twitter Challenge

I didn't know much about Twitter, the free social networking site when I signed up for it almost a year ago. In fact, I don't even remember what prompted me to join. Perhaps it was the appeal or challenge of trying to limit my content to 140 characters. Or it may have been the idea itself of 'micro-blogging,' something I saw beneficial to those of us with short attention spans or limited time in general.

I should have known it would only be a matter of time until Associated Content would put Twitter 'out there' as a topic for a writing challenge.

Now, almost a year and over 200 followers later, I still can't say I really understand what it is all about! I read somewhere, when I initially joined Twitter that most people only stay with a site like that for an average of 2 months before losing interest. Perhaps, if I'd known the true intention of the site I would have followed that norm. However, like most other social networking or blogging sites I've become involved with, I ended up using it as a book-marking site for myself. Rarely do I go back and look at past tweets, either of my own or of my followers. Things just move too quickly and there is too much to keep up with with new 'tweets' always coming in. Therefore I just 'favorite' things I want to remember.

Somewhere along the line I did start to post links to my Associated Content articles there, though I can't say I've done it consistently.

When I saw the Twitter Challenge announced, I thought it would give me an opportunity to test the waters and see what sort of difference 'tweeting' my articles might make.

I tweeted a previously written article and left that link hanging out there for about a day. Meanwhile, I had written a couple of newer articles, which I posted simultaneously, leaving each out there for about a day each. To be honest, it didn't seem to make much difference. While page views came in much faster, they also fizzled down much faster than articles that hadn't been posted. I even 'retweeted' some of the same articles, but still found no dramatic difference in my number of page views.

I knew that some of my 'followers' were people into making money online and shared information and links on doing such. When I examined their pages I saw that what they were doing was retweeting the same links and messages over and over again on a regular basis. This, I thought was a bit extreme and something that would quickly deter anyone interested in following.

One good thing about Twitter that I soon discovered was that it provides you with useful aps, such as Tweetstats for helping you track your stats!

Keying your Twitter username into Tweetstats will return your Tweets per hour, Tweets per month, a Tweet timeline, and your reply statistics. Although this was interesting to know about myself it really didn't help me in the marketing department. Tweetstats also produced a 'word cloud' for me. From this I learned that among my top five words used were; 'aclink', 'product', and 'review.' So at least I know I'm posting accurately!

What I think may be more helpful for me is to work this in a reverse fashion using Tweetstats to tell me what the currently popular trend topics are. I could then write my AC articles based on either that particular days 'trend cloud' or the 50 most popular trends of all time! Perhaps I'll try out this angle and write another article based on those findings. Meanwhile, it's back to book marking for Twitter and me!