Twitter Follow-Backs

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I have officially stopped. I have stopped playing the stupid tit-for-tat followers games. I got the above this morning in my email saying that I was being followed, and that we would have a pact, and if I followed they would keep the follow and if I unfollowed them on Twitter, they would unfollow as well.

Bully for them. I am tired of playing this game. I will return to my true self. I will not follow ghetto rap artists. I will not follow girls more intent on showing their breasts rather than reading my content. I will not follow fundamentalist, racist Republicans.

I will just follow people and accounts that I am interested in, and will not follow you just because you follow me. Inflated follower numbers mean nothing. I have conducted experiments on how to convert followers to web hits, and the only way to do it, is to emulate the religion model. Anyone who is a true follower, will check out your website. Anyone paying lip service and just playing the tit-for-tat following game cannot be converted to web hits and is uninterested in what you have to say.

So most of my followers are real now. If you want to follow me for real, I can be followed @ArtOfWarm. If you are interesting, have decent content, and are not trying to sell me something, I will follow you back,

Twitter to Web Hits Conversion Statistics

I sometimes treat the Internet like a live organism. A good biologist does subtle experiments on an organism to learn its nature. Sometimes it helps to treat the web as such.

For example, I often wondered what the empirical conversion ratio was of converting Twitter followers into web hits or page views.

It is easy to get Twitter followers. Most people on Twitter do a tit-for-tat, I'll-follow-you-if-you-follow-me thing. Needless to say, these types of followers are not high-quality in the respect that they really aren't interested in your content. All they want of you is to follow their narcissistic tweets and appreciate how important they are in the grand scheme of things.

I have a plethora of life coaches, motivational speakers, stars and celebrities that I have never heard of and other assorted folks following me on Twitter. So, the big question is how many of these can I convert to go and look at a related web page?

I decided to do a test. I put up a blog of lifestyle-specific aphorisms and created a Twitter account to match it. Then I went to work on Twitter. I followed everyone that Twitter suggested. I soon got a respectable following.

I used tools like Tweepi.com to chop out the non-followers and folks who wouldn't play the game. My Twitter account advertises my website. I am not going to give the URLs out, because the experiment is continuing and I don't want to skew the results.

After a few months of experimentation, I have a preliminary answer that is holding fast. The numbers aren't very promising. I can convert only 2.5% of my Twitter followers to become regular followers on my website.

I suppose that it doesn't matter for large numbers. If you have hundreds of thousands of followers, then the 2.5% is significant, and if you can attract that many, then you have content that will boost the percentage that convert from Twitter as well.

But if you are just starting out in social media marketing and need a rough guideline to start, the 2.5% is holding fairly steady for me. And that is my 2.5 cents.