Twitter in action: A couple of real life examples

At my WNA lunch presentation last week someone asked me about measuring the effect of social networking/media tools. It was a good question & I don’t have a quantifiable answer – all I could say at the time was that I see peaks in sign-ups, page views etc after I’ve shared one of my own articles, blog posts etc. However, just the day after & again today, something interesting happened that is not quantifiable, but a good example to share. Both were Twitter posts.

Being retweeted by BIG players

There’s a convention amongst Twitter users that if you ‘retweet’ something someone else in your network has tweeted, you post it with RT attached. For example if I shared something, you thought it was good & wanted to share it further, you’d write ‘RT @caroldaunt’ followed by the message.

Last week one of my blog posts was picked up by a couple of big players in my industry & retweeted. (My blog posts are automatically sent to Twitter – easy to set up.) One of these players has 607 followers & the other has 1,161 followers. So suddenly my blog post was promoted to 1768 extra people. Did I see an upsurge of over 1000 readers? No – but there was small spike in reads of that post. And I believe being promoted to 1768 people can’t be a bad thing.

Driving people to read your articles

The second interesting thing happened this morning. I decided to upload a couple of recent articles to Scribd. Naturally I tweeted that they were available to read online. Within minutes one of them had 24 reads ! Also – an email just arrived – see below.

Being promoted to 50 million users can’t be a bad thing either! Here I am on the front page of Scribd – and in the time it’s taken to post this picture, the number of readers has increased to 67  (Why not go check how many reads it’s had now? Click here.)

So….. no quantifiable sales – but an example of the power of social networking & the new age of promoting yourself & your business.