What Happens When Mashable Tweets Your Site?

Reading time: About 3 minutes

On Friday February 6th, Nearby Tweets was tweeted by @Mashable. For anybody involved in the Internet, it’s like finding a small treasure as a pirate. Though, I must say I love ninjas and therefore cannot like pirates (they are universal adversaries, see Real Ultimate Power.net for more info on ninjas).

So what happens when @Mashable tweets your site? Well, here’s what happened yesterday (based on Google Analytics)…

  • Traffic jumped from an average of 500 daily visits to 4,210 visits, an 842% spike in traffic including 1,331 referrals from Twitter alone.
  • According to Retweetist, the URL was retweeted 92 times and hit #1 on its hot retweets list and #2 on its top retweeted URLs list. That’s just retweets of Nearby Tweets mind you, and doesn’t count original tweets linking to Nearby Tweets.
  • Bookmarks on delicious.com jumped from about 65 to about 250, a 385% increase in delicious bookmarks. And yes, it hit the elusive Delicious.com homepage shortly after making Delicious.com’s Popular bookmarks. Being on Delicious.com’s front page gave me 336 referrals in the few hours Nearby Tweets was there.
  • I don’t know exactly how many new followers I got that day, but I’m guessing around 50. Nothing exceptional.

So what now?

Time to maintain the momentum. You see, Nearby Tweets is not even finished. I expect I would have had an even more impressive Twitter effect if Nearby Tweets was polished, but it’s not. On that topic, I am happy to say that Nearby Tweets’ design is almost complete, and it totally kicks ass. As a teaser I’ll say this: The design will change depending on what time you visit the site.So if you haven’t, make sure you give Nearby Tweets a bookmark on delicious or a stumble on StumbleUpon.

What can you gain from this insight?

  • Don’t have a crappy host. Get Media Temple. They’re superior to all other hosts.
  • It’s only a spike in traffic. It will burst and die quickly like a box of 99 cent sparklers. Have tools in place to sustain the momentum, like clear social bookmarking links (with icons to pop out), a subscribe link if your site is a blog, and anything else you can think of to add what Internet Marketers call “stickiness.”
  • Don’t expect fame. If you want to be famous on the Web, you have to create and inspire over and over. Otherwise you’ll be dust in the wind.
  • Be aware of your site’s promotion strategy. With Nearby Tweets, I wanted to get feedback during the development process and create awareness that it is in beta stage. By doing so, I did get feedback, but I also lost a lot of opportunities with people who don’t like ugly sites. My challenge now will be to re-promote Nearby Tweets when it is finished (polished design), which will take some work to reach out the people with whom I’ve already created a first impression. If you’re okay with these challenges, then I would not recommend waiting until everything is perfect before releasing your Web app. Otherwise, you may find yourself to late to the market.

18 comments skip to comment form

  1. Jay said— 26 minutes later

    Thanks for the tips. These kind of spikes always come when you least expect them. Always best to be prepared. I learned my lesson earlier when my site was featured in Mashable but didn’t see as much traffic as your site. Probably because mine is not realted to Twitter..the Buzz word. Keep it up!

    #1

  2. Amy Greenlaw said— 29 minutes later

    That is impressive, and then Mashable tweeted this post! So I am sure you will now have even more traffic and will need to update this blog post!
    Question is, how did Mashable come to tweet you in the first place? did you approach them? Send them something?

    #2

  3. Brian Cray said— 30 minutes later

    No, I didn’t approach Mashable. I guess my tweets about Nearby Tweets (or someone else’s) just reached the right ears.

    #3

  4. unimatrix0 said— 35 minutes later

    hey thanks for the info. I am just getting up and running. Right now I am using google blogspot but I am wondering if I should switch. Anyway, lots of things to think about, thanks again.

    #4

  5. Brian Cray said— 44 minutes later

    No problem, glad everyone is enjoying the insight!

    #5

  6. Tom said— 6 hours later

    Hey Brian,

    Interesting reading! We are just looking at letting people know about our site but don’t want it to go offline with the first peak in visitors! I would be interested to know which package nearbytweets is hosted on MediaTemple and how you found their service?

    Cheers!

    #6

  7. Mark S. Luckie said— 11 hours later

    This reminds me of the chaos that happened when my site hit the front page Digg. I put together an animated video chronicling the situation here: http://www.10000words.net/2008/08/what-it-feels-like-to-make-front-page.html

    #7

  8. Robert Banh said— 12 hours later

    Unfortunately you are dead on correct about losing people due to an ugly site. The features are awesome, but people judge through the book jacket. I can’t wait to see the refresh design!

    #8

  9. Mike Templeton said— 17 hours later

    My thoughts are right in line with the rest of you in saying that the design of a website can make or break you. I think it’s important to get feedback early on in the development process, but once you’ve finally garnered that initial rush of visitors, it’s going to be even harder to get them to come back when you are REALLY ready to launch.

    At the rate new Twitter-related apps are popping up, a large portion of the audience will just bounce around from one app to the next, so you’ve got to have a very solid product that people see value in using repeatedly so you can continue to get them to return.

    I think what you’ve put together at Nearby Tweets is very slick (and still different from other Twitter locating apps) and I hope you’ll see your traffic return when you are finally ready for the full launch.

    I do have one question for you though: was upgrading at MediaTemple worth the cost/effort involved? As you said, the traffic was essentially just a large spike, but apparently it has dropped back down to normal levels now? What do those ongoing levels look like? Without an obvious method for making the site pay for itself, is that additional cost for hosting something a simple startup can afford? Would they be better off just making do with what they have and letting the site crash? I suppose in the long run you want to make sure the website stays live, but if you won’t average 4,000 visits per day in the long run, can you really justify that cost early on?

    #9

  10. Mobile Mashup said— 18 hours later

    lol the traffic boost isn’t really all that much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good but the jump isn’t as great as I’d expected from a high alexa ranking site, a site on digg all the time, and a site that’s amongst the top 100 blogs on technorati.

    #10

  11. Bjorn said— 19 hours later

    Isn’t that the kind of push in the back we all dream of? ;-)
    Good luck with getting more tweets ;-)

    #11

  12. Brian Cray said— 22 hours later

    @bjorn – yes… and we’ve got to keep on pushin :)

    @mobile mashup – you’re right, these results are insignificant when compared with sites that receive 10,000+ monthly visits. Having said that, most sites don’t have that traffic so I think this article relates well to the rest of us. :)

    #12

  13. Laura said— 1 day later

    I’m curious about your own Twitter usage. Do you have any analytic data regarding how much traffic you got from Twitter before and after that Mashable reference? And how many followers you had or others had when they mentioned your site on Twitter? Mashable seems like a special Twitter case so I’m kind of interested to see other metrics that people have in regards to Twitter as I expect, for the average person, those Tweets are much less effective.

    #13

  14. Brian Cray said— 2 days later

    @Laura – I had about 50 new followers in the time when the URL was booming. I get new followers everyday, so I can’t really say if the new followers are because of that now or other things I’m doing.

    #14

  15. Pliggs said— 2 days later

    Mashable can Tweet my site anyday it likes, maybe today.

    :)

    #15

  16. car floor jacks said— 1 month later

    I have to say, that I can not agree with you in 100%, but it’s just my opinion, which could be wrong.
    p.s. You have an awesome template . Where have you got it from?

    #16

  17. Samuel L. said— 3 months later

    I read your posts for a long time and must tell you that your articles are always valuable to readers.

    #17

  18. Jonathan@365icon said— on February 8, 2009 later

    Brian,
    cool post. glad this happened for you. you deserve to be heard by the masses. your posts are always welcome in my inbox ;)
    TGIF!
    jonathan

    #18

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