One of the best ways to understand growth hacking is to actually test & do growth hacking. Not only will you begin to understand how it works, but you’ll also get to learn some cool tactics.
According to Hubspot, “Unless you are a red carpet celebrity or a mega brand, creating a Twitter profile is certainly not a case of “build it and they will come”. Organically attracting a large following on social media tends to be a bit of a slow burn..” So unless you have an engaging brand on Twitter, it’s not easy to get referral traffic. Right now I do not get a lot of traffic from Twitter, but let’s test some tactics that “gurus” always talk about. 🙂
Below are all the steps (framework) I use to run my growth hacking experiments.
Hypothesis – If I increase the frequency of visual tweets, the engagement and referral traffic from Twitter to my website should increase.
Platform – Twitter
Resource – Myself
How long – 4 week’s experiment
How to measure – Use google analytics to measure social traffic coming from Twitter.
Pass/Fail Criteria – I would like to increase Twitter referral traffic by 3x. Right now I only get ~32 monthly visits from Twitter. Most of my social traffic is coming from Facebook & LinkedIn.
Process – Here is the process (or growth hacks) that I am going to use and you can too.
1 – Increase my daily tweets from 5-6 to 10-15
2 – Add an image to 50% of my Tweet. My goal is to make all of my tweets visual but for this experiment since I don’t have an extra resource, I am only committing to 50% visual tweets. I am going to use Buffer and Canva to create visuals. According to Buffer, Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets so this tactic should increase my engagement on the platform.
3 – Share my blog posts multiple times (e.g. Tweet same blog link at least twice a week). I am using tools like Hootsuite and Tweet Jukebox for scheduling.
4 – Participate in a relevant Twitter chat on a weekly basis. A lot of social media experts show up for #InfluencerChat so I am going to participate in this chat and make some new friends.
5 – Follow 80/20 rule. 20% tweets will be the links to my blog posts and 80% will be educational tweets. Since I am in social media niche, I can create simple how-to tweets and tips.
Results
(10/27/15) – In last 4 weeks I was able to triple the website traffic from Twitter (see below). My previous monthly traffic was just ~32 visits. Visual content makes a huge difference and I believe if I share more images on Twitter I can drive even more traffic over time.
On top of that, this traffic is spending more than 4min on my website, so its relevant & quality traffic 🙂
Now over to you. Did I miss anything? What would you add to this experiment?