Anyone who knows me probably knows that I like to experiment and play around with technology, tools, software etc.,
For the last week or so I’ve been running an experiment with this blog’s older posts and Twitter.
Basically I’ve been sending links to some of my older blog posts out via Twitter, which is why they’re “tagged” as “from the archives”.
When I first started the experiment I was sending posts of ANY date out, but, as James pointed out, some of the posts would have been relatively time-sensitive when I first published them, so while they might be vaguely interesting they’re not relevant.
So now I’ve set the plugin to restrict itself to posts within the last 700 days. I’ve also set it to exclude some categories, as I thought they’d be a lot less relevant now.
The impact on this site’s traffic hasn’t been that noticeable. Sure, the number of referrals from Twitter might have gone up a small bit, but the overall traffic levels are pretty much the same as always.
What is, however, quite interesting is to see that quite a few of these automated tweets have provoked reactions. While some have been due to dead links (the web is constantly changing!), there’s also been some interesting reactions, retweets and more.
It’s an ongoing experiment and the volume of the tweets is pretty low (about 4 a day) and considering my general tweeting frequency it’s pretty much negligible.
If you’re interested the plugin I’m using is available here. You can tweak the settings so that the Twitter application is called whatever you like. Also, as I discovered, it won’t work on WordPress sites that don’t already have a steady flow of traffic, as it relies on WordPress “faux cron” (or whatever it’s actually called)
I love Tweet Old Post – some days it accounts for up to half my twitter traffic. Generally if I think a post is time-sensitive, or will date quickly I categorize it as a “Calendar Event” and I have set up the plugin to exclude any posts in that category. Works pretty well.
Lisa
The category idea is good, though it won’t help me too much 🙁
Michele
Yeah – it was easy for me to implement because I’d only been blogging for a couple of months when I started using the plugin. If I was trying to implement it now I’d have no hope.