I have to confess that until last month I tried to ignore twitter because I thought it was a waste of time. I was convinced that there was no real value in twitter and that it was another distraction like facebook that I didn’t need. However, just as facebook turned out to be a very useful tool (I met my wife there!), twitter is also becoming a very useful tool for my sites.
I think my conversion really started when I installed the BackType Connect WordPress Plugin on my site. This plugin captures comments that are left on other sites when one of your posts is added, including tweets. Suddenly on my sites I could see firsthand how many times my posts were being shared with twitter users. Seeing this previously hidden activity made me think, why not share my posts myself and try and build a twitter following?
As Daniel quite rightly points out, Twitter has a much cleaner process for sharing links and stories, where posts don’t get buried a la digg, or where a small minor of users control what everyone else gets to see. Also, because Twitter has reached a much wider userbase than sites like Digg or Reddit it could allow sites to tap into a wider base of readers, rather than just fellow bloggers who are all reading exactly the same blogs.
I just wish I’d taken twitter more seriously 3, 6 or 12 months ago. My twitter follower count is still quite small as it’s only one month old, but I’m working hard to grow it by investing in tools, as well as increasing my interaction with other twitter users and following everyone who follows me on twitter. Equally, the amount of traffic to my sites from twitter is still so small that so far I’ve only seen a few (very small) but I’m determined to now develop twitter as a significant traffic source for my sites.
Whether i’ll every reach the levels of sites like TechCrunch, where twitter is now the 2nd largest single source of traffic after Google is unlikely, but that’s not going to stop me trying!
