What is a Twitter minute? Does it matter?
A Twitter minute is a term I invented while staring at my Google Analytics statistics. I was appalled and saddened when I found out that the thousands I had spent on Twitter PPC had gotten me the highest bounce rate in the Twitterverse as well as the Twittersphere. People only spend a few seconds on my page on average, although we got a lot of sign ups on my Twitter account. The average time spent on my page by organic Twitter followers was over two minutes while the pay-per-click crowd averaged about four seconds. Bizarre.
A Twitter Minute = sixty seconds spent on my blog from a visit from someone that found our link on Twitter
The Google Algorithm
Basically, what counts is that Google algorithm rewards your main site when your blog gets more traffic, particular more traffic from social media. But, if the time spent on your blog from new visitors is only four seconds, what happens? Do you get penalized, or do you get a benefit? The answer is neither. You can spend hours on the internet reading about the Penguin algorithm, the Panda algorithm and lots of other cool names, but those articles will tell you nothing useful about how the algorithms apply to you other than the fact that it is very bad to have poor quality incoming links!
My strategy for getting higher quality clicks
Having photos and pics on my blogs would make a difference. Nice looking pics double Facebook engagement, and would lengthen the amount of time people spend on my blog pages. Another helpful thing to do is to have paragraph headers and bold them. It is easier to read a long article that is cut into bite sized easy to digest pieces.
Twitter minutes as a tool to measure your various campaigns
I have a dozen social media campaigns going on simultaneously, and I’m always comparing them. My main measure used to be how many clicks I got to my blog pages or site pages. This matters. But, after my tragedy on PPC, Twitter minutes is my new measure. Of course if a click comes from Google+, and recently I have been getting many from there, then I can no longer really call it a Twitter minute. It would be a plus minute.
Calculations comparing social media platforms
I calculated how much time I put into Google+, and calculated the rewards. The most effective use of my time was posting my blog entries on their community pages, and I post on many! I get to learn which of my blog entries are interesting to the masses, and also get to see what my bounce rate is. If I spend an hour posting on Google+, I might get about 70 clicks, each of which averages about 35 seconds. If I spruced up those blog articles that did exceptionally well with expensive pics and artfully rewritten text and submitted only those really popular articles on a regular basis, I might get over 100 clicks and over a “Plus Minute” in reading time.
With Twitter, the calculation is different. On Google+, I post mainly to other people’s communities. On Twitter, I have my own communities — six to be exact, and soon to add a few more. The interesting thing with Twitter, is that the efficiency of the time you spend posting is directly proportional to how many relevant and active followers you have in your network. You could spend 90 seconds posting to a group with one million reasonable quality followers and get 10,000+ clicks. Or you could spend the same 90 seconds on a network with one hundred followers and not get a single click. With Twitter, I can calculate how long it will take me to accumulate a critical mass of followers. I can calculate how many Twitter minutes of reading time I will get once I have that mass as well. It is hard to compare a fixed target to a moving target like Twitter.
Summary
When optimizing your social media campaigns, you need to understand the following. You don’t need all of your blog articles to be favorites. They don’t all have to have pics. It is good to do experimental ideas in your blog to see what your audience likes. If they like a particular theme or title, then you can spruce it up after the fact, or completely rewrite it and publish it again! If you are going to promote particular blog articles again and again, you are getting inefficient results on your sweat equity if you don’t have optimized articles. That means beautifully written, great keywords, pics, and very popular titles. The title is 30% of your popularity right there!