The Trials of Tweeting: Taking the AC Twitter Challenge

I'd just recently returned to Associated Content after having been gone for several months, taking a little writing vacation. Imagine my surprise, when I took note of all the changes and learned about the new AC Twitter Challenge! Seeing as how I'm new to the concept of social networking, I was eager to try out this new method, to see if it would help generate more traffic to the various articles that I've written. After nearly a month of participating in the AC Twitter Challenge, here are my thoughts and findings:

I have to admit that I'd joined twitter.com more than a month prior to the AC Twitter Challenge and had left all of a whopping single tweet, before deciding this really wasn't my bag of chips. Honestly, I'm a writer - and I really didn't imagine anyone would be all that interested in hearing that I was banging away at the keyboard and writing yet another article on some obscure breed of dog that no one had heard of. However, in the interest of science (and great prizes), I decided to give it another chance and to try my hand at further tweeting.

In the month's time since I joined the Twitter Challenge, I've left approximately 15 tweets and have watched my followers increase from a small handful of less than a dozen, to more than 30 different individuals. This was an impressive leap forward and I was very excited by the prospect of how the increased tweetage would affect my daily page views.

Strangely enough, however, I didn't see the expected increase. This was puzzling. Was I a Twitter failure? Sadly enough, I truly wondered that - especially when, during my month of tweeting, I actually experienced my lowest mark in more than 2 months - Only 125 views on one day! My highest in the graph actually came prior to starting the AC Twitter Challenge when, during the month of August, I had 337 page views (wow, what got into everyone that day?) So this was more than double the number of views when I was tweeting. Interesting!

Tweeting did not prove to be a total bust, however. While I didn't see the soaring numbers that I had hoped to amass with my social network experiment, I did see one signifigant change - Although I did experience an all-time low during this month, the majority of my page views seem to be balancing out a bit more. I may not have incredibly high numbers, but I'm seeing a very slow but gradual increase in daily views and, interestingly, I am not experiencing low days that are as drastic as that one 125 view day. If anything, the fluctuation seems to vary less, suggesting that I'm getting a more steady stream of viewers on my pages and that it may be people who are reading my content more regularly, as opposed to having days when everyone rushes to read my new material and dry spells when no one reads any of my material at all.

In summation, I believe that this social networking experiment has proven to be successful, if even on a small scale. Gathering a following of loyal readers is never an easy task, whether you write poetry, novels, or enjoy blogging - It all takes time and even a marginal increase is still a good thing.

While I'm still not an avid tweeter and I really don't think anyone wants to read my tweeting about making a bologna sandwich, I do think I'll continual to use these social networking tools to help increase my number of readers.

Two thumbs up for a fun challenge and an interesting experiment, AC!