This post is the culmination of a long experiment with twitter and I have bad news for twitter, MLMs (multi level marketers) will kill it and so will anyone else with a business model that can extract value from exponentially growing network… so any blogger.
So I’ve built up quite a following on twitter, mainly due to my popular T-Shirt blog Tcritic.com and as of two days ago I had 1,800 followers on twitter. Now that’s a pretty respectable number but of course pales into comparison with people like Scoble who has 45,000 followers, and Garyvee with 25,000 followers, or Kevin Rose, founder of Digg with 77,000 followers. And forget about it when Twitter gets mainstream which it will as soon as kids realize Brittney is on there with 10,000 followers and sports fans realize Shaq is there with 18,000 followers . Anyway, the point is i’ve got a pretty small network compared to these guys.
So a couple of days ago I saw a tweet about a competition to win a gift certificate for KMART, all you needed to do to enter the contest is RT (retweet or rebroadcast) that message to your network of followers. Simple idea, so I tried it using $25 Threadless gift certificates (I get $3 to spend at threadless every time I send them business and I don’t need more T-shirts) and posted this (note that I included my name in the message so people would rebroadcast that:
@karllong is giving away 10 x $25 gift certificates for http://threadless.com - just RT this to enter, will tweet the winners
I then had another window open at search.twitter.com searching on my name and watched as people rebroadcast the message, again and again and again. In the end the message was rebroadcast by 500+ people to their networks. The first person to RT this message was CoryObrien who has 1,200 followers so I almost doubled my reach with the first step. From an impressions or click through standpoint I have no idea the actual conversion rate, I had included a link to threadless.com in my original tweet and chose to leave the url long so people could see what the link was.
Luckily I do usually shorten my url’s that I post to twitter using cli.gs because I get ongoing metrics on my links I share and my click through rate is well over 2% for just general FYI links I put out there.
by: Karl Long
Posted by: Loïc LAMY
Posted on: levidepoches.fr/contagiousideas
Source: FutureLab
Credit: thesite
