Article originally written and published for Inbound Marketing University

As a follow up to yesterday's article on the power of twitter to increase brand awareness, I would like to share another recent example that illustrates how Twitter can help increase website traffic by leveraging social networks.

For those who use Twitter, you understand the power that it can have on building and expanding your brand. For those still on the fence as to whether or not Twitter can be used for business purposes, I will share 2 quick examples that we just recently experienced.

One of the advantages of Twitter is that your brand can very quickly and easily be promoted to other, larger networks. In both examples, this was certainly the case.

In our first example, I received an email from a former colleague who launched a new website. He was looking for some general feedback - and also wanted to let me know the website was live for my viewing pleasure. I checked out the site and was very impressed, so I tweeted about it to our 600+ followers (certainly not a huge following) and encouraged them to check out the site because I truly felt it was of value to them.

What happened next illustrates the power of twitter for brand exposure. One of our followers retweeted (RT) my original tweet to his network of 5,500 followers. And then another one of our followers retweeted it to their network of 450+ followers. So, in a very short time over 6,000 people were exposed to this new website. Certainly not a bad thing for a start-up site looking for increased exposure.

The results of these efforts (which took no real effort at all) was an 80% increase in website traffic. Admittedly, it didn’t send millions of viewers to his site but I don’t think any business would complain about that type of return on their marketing effort.

The other benefit was that my former colleague had the opportunity to post a “thank you” reply to those who mentioned his site, which creates goodwill amongst all parties and opens the door for future engagement. You can see how over time each of these small touch points can have a positive effect for a brand. After all, isn’t it the little things that make the big difference?

Tomorrow I will share our second example of how Twitter can increase your brand exposure. Do any of you have examples of Twitter success? If so, please share them in the comments section below.

Article originally written and published for Inbound Marketing University

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