The AC Twitter Challenge

When I saw the Twitter challenge posted on the Calls for Content on AC, I grabbed it straight away. "Chance to win a free netbook!", I thought. Then, after the initial excitement of that had died down, I thought about it again, and realised this was certainly worth a try.

I've actually had a Twitter account for at least six months, but I've made very little use of it. I'm not one hundred per cent sure why I joined it in the first place. It may have been during the initial enthusiasm for the site when it started becoming popular. It may have been when Associated Content introduced auto-posting to Twitter, and I figured another form of publicity never hurts. Of course, in this those days I had even less of a clue as to how to promote articles, and didn't realise it helped actually have a network of people who might actually be interested in what you advertise on a site...

So, when I took the Twitter challenge, I had an account with perhaps 2 posts, both automated, no-one following me, and perhaps 1 person I was following. Clearly this had to change, and was presumably the reason for the challenge in the first place.

First thing I did was gather minions. The obvious place to start was the Associated Content forums, and sure enough, there was a thread for people who were wanting to network with others. I essentially added as many of these to my following as my attention span could handle. Over the next week or so, I think most of them added me back; after all, we had at least one thing in common.

I also found myself adding quite a few people who almost certainly wouldn't be following me or reading my articles, though I'd be thrilled if they did: Celebrities, or at least in celebrities in my opinion - people who don't get on the cover o Entertainment weekly, but whose opinions amuse, entertain or educate me. Over the last few weeks, many and varied names have ended up on my following list. To choose a few at random: Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry, Nick Frost, Wil Wheaton, and Paul Cornell. Depending where you live and your viewing/reading habits, you might not have heard of any of them, but still. As I said, none of these have been terribly helpful in terms of page hits, but their posts are tremendous fun to read.

One thing I would recommend if you're going to try and use Twitter as a large scale networking tool (which really, was the point of this exercise) is not to actually read and post through twitter.com if you can actuall help it. It's much easier to sort and organise posts through a software client, many of which are available for free. I personally recommend Tweetdeck, which updates both twitter and facebook into itself on a regular basis and informs you when new messages arrive.

And then we come to the big question: Did any of this make an impact on my page hits? To be honest, it's very hard to tell. New articles I've posted are already added to twitter, of course, and I've retweeted a few of my older ones out of curiousity. But then, I've also added a lot of them to stumbleupon and facebook again, so I honestly can't say where the extra traffic is coming from. That there is an increase is obvious. I'm still earning peanuts from page hits, but there are at least twice as many peanuts as before.

Whether or not it's actually earning money for me though, I'll certainly be using twitter a lot more in the future. It seems to have moved out of its 'early adopter' phase and becoming something that suddenly everything does, one of those 'steam engine time' moments. At this point, even Elizabeth Taylor is tweeting. Elizabeth Taylor!

If she's managing to post on there regularly, I really ought to make the effort. You never know, she might end up reading this ;)