November 10, 2009 
A few months back when we decided it was time to give WPMU.org (that’s this site) a facelift, we also decided that we needed to take Twitter seriously.
Unfortunately we didn’t have the ‘WPMU’ twitter feed…. so we plunged in with the oh so catchy WPMUORG name and started Tweeting away.
And, as you can see to the side of this post, we decided to get a cute background image too.. which I kinda like :)
And we did some other things too, namely we:
- Dedicated a good amount of ‘company time’ to Tweeting
- Started using the most excellent Tweet Spinner (I can’t recommend them highly enough, well worth $15 per month!)
- Started actively monitoring many many Twitter search feeds (for WPMU, WordPress MU etc.) to see if we could help people out with WPMU issues
- Set up Twitter Tools to work with this blog
And, after that, took it up a notch by:
- Actually hiring someone to manage tweets (Hi Sarah :)
- Adding in ‘Tweet This’ links at the bottom of each post
- Running a Twitter related competition (add us to your list and win a prize)
And what, you may ask were the net results?
Well, let me tell you… they have been pretty good.. check this out:
Yep, that’s right, our largest referring source is now Twitter!
After only a few months of (relatively) simple work!
Sure, as you can see, they don’t hang around as long as from other sites… but they are Twitter users, that’s understandable, and 3:08 is pretty decent all the same, and all in all you certainly can’t shake a stick at it.
Now, one of the reasons I thought I’d write this up is that it ‘confirms’ (to a degree) this RWW post on Twitter / Facebook brand recognition.
Especially this:
So, let me tell you this.
People do and will follow brands on Twitter – it’s worth investing your time and effort into it – and you will see results!
Which brings me back to that article, and the question ‘Where to from here’?
Well, the following, I think, answers that question pretty well:
At the moment we’re all about:
- Information
- Helping
- Chat
But I think we need to be much much more about:
- Exclusive deals and offers
And I reckon the same is probably true for any brand out there using Twitter… so we’ll give that a go, and let you know how we manage.
And of course, if you want to find out the results… of course the best thing you can probably do is follow WPMU.ORG on Twitter :)
Looking forward to any other ideas / thoughts.
This is an excellent case study useful to anyone looking to leverage social media in general and Twitter in particular in very smart ways. I want to bring to your attention the first and only truly semantic search engine that currently works on Twitter data, TipTop, now available in a beta version at http://FeelTipTop.com TipTop’s powerful engine understands each and every message on Twitter just like a human being would. As a result, it can discover from within the data the very best tweets organized nicely along a variety of categories and concepts learned dynamically. In fact, the entire platform learns from data as data flows through the engine. You can now see in real time the sentiment associated with anything in the world that people are talking about. One of the searches related to your Twitter account is http://feeltiptop.com/%40wpmuorg/ Please give TipTop a try. You will soon see that TipTop truly is a magic engine useful for a variety of purposes.
I follow a couple of businesses. Doesn’t mean I follow brands.
Excellent post! Very impressed that you backed up what you said with Google stats.
Definitely something that bloggers need to do more, just as long as they can balance the helpful tweets against the “Oy! look at my wonderful blog post about x, y and z here!” tweets pushing content from your own blog.
Nice job. :)
great post! i use twitter for spreading an idea or information. i use it to get update from great source of information too.