Twitter is my favorite social media platform for the following reasons:
- It’s the best platform for connecting with other website owners in your niche.
- You can reach a massive audience when your tweets get retweeted by other users.
- You can post links to your articles as often as you’d like and get free traffic.
In terms of how you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your website, I recommend the following steps.
Step 1: Optimize your profile.
Once you create a free account, the first step is to optimize your profile. This includes:
- Place a logo or a picture of yourself as the Profile picture (mine is my website logo)
- Choose a cover photo (mine is a white background)
- Write a brief bio (this should be the tagline of your site or a short description about who you are and what you do)
- Link to your website (notice that mine links to fourpillarfreedom.com)
- Create a pinned tweet that points to either an article on your site or a link to a product or service your offer.
The idea is that when a random person stumbles upon your profile, they should be able to:
- Immediately understand who you are and/or what you do.
- Have an easy way to access your website.
- Have an easy way to learn about a product or service you offer.
Step 2: Tweet interesting things.
This is the crux of Twitter. If you can tweet interesting things in under 280 characters, you will gain a following. It’s as simple as that.
In general, audiences on Twitter respond best to pithy ideas around the following topics:
- Health
- Wealth
- Happiness
Two examples of people who do this really well are James Clear and Naval Ravikant. Skim through their Tweets for a few minutes and you’ll immediately understand why they have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Bonus: Check out this list of James Clear’s top 10 tweets of 2019.
In terms of the formatting, I’ve found that it helps to split up tweets into several lines. This has the added benefit of taking up more space on people’s Twitter feeds, which increases the chances that your tweet will stand out.
For example, one of my most popular tweets of all time was quite long:
To actually drive traffic to articles on your site, it helps to tweet out a brief summary of the big ideas covered in your article along with a link to the article. For example:
Because this article got retweeted 27 times, it inevitably showed up on people’s Twitter feeds who don’t currently follow me. This increased exposure to my article even more.
Another tactic that tends to work well is using a Thread, which is simply a list of connected tweets. For example, I once tweeted out a thread of six tweets about daily writing that got quite a lot exposure:
Threads work well because they allow you to share several connected big ideas in an easy-to-read format. As an example of someone who does this well, check out David Perell.
Step 3: Respond to accounts larger than yours.
The best way to increase your Twitter following, especially early on, is to respond to tweets made by people with larger accounts.
For example, you’ll notice that each time James Clear tweets something out there will be hundreds of people who respond to his tweet. If your response is near the top, you’ll immediately gain exposure to his audience of over 200,000 followers.
Of course, you’ll want to make sure your response is actually interesting and relevant or else Twitter won’t display your response near the top.
Rinse and Repeat
The path to growing a Twitter audience involves repeating two steps over and over again:
- Tweet interesting things.
- Interact with accounts larger than yours.
If you just do these two things over and over again, your following will naturally increase.
Eventually you’ll reach a point where your audience is large enough that you can tweet out a link to an article on your site and bring in hundreds or even thousands of pageviews from a single tweet.
Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered to be advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell any securities, please see my Terms & Conditions page for a full disclaimer.
