Over the couple of weeks, I’ve been trying out a new thing here on the blog and Twitter.
Each day I spend time each morning pouring through different information sources to gain my bearings for the day. I have a couple of key interests: economic news, consumer trends, media developments and marketing insights.
Rather than develop specific posts around a few key points each day, I thought I’d tweet those things that I thought were useful or interesting. Then, each day, a widget gathers those tweets and consolidates them into a blog post.
To keep the Twitter stream clean, I set up a separate ViralHousingFix Twitter identity. (No need to follow: all of the info-Tweets go out under my @danielrmccarthy account and the ViralHousingFix account.)
One of my main reasons for trying this out is an attempt to drive traffic to original information sources, rather than co-opt their content to create traffic on my blog. If I have something interesting to say about the post or data, or if I believe something is important enough that I want my audience to see it, then I’ll build a blog post. Otherwise, I’m hoping people will click through to the original article.
How will I measure the effectiveness of this? By how many click-throughs I send to other information sources, both from my Twitter accounts and the blog.
One thing: the shortened-URLs are frustrating. I would want to be able to see the whole URL, and possibly a preview of the page that is cited if I were reading these daily feeds. I’m poking around for a WordPress widget that does it. Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks.
