What Happens When Mashable Tweets Your Site?

Posted February 8, 2009 by Brian Cray

Reading time: About 3 minutes

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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.

About the author

Brian Cray is a Columbus, Ohio-based web entrepreneur & consultant. View some of Brian’s work in his portfolio and learn how to make kick ass websites by reading his blog.