Case study of a popular blog post
Monday, March 9th, 2009
On February 20th, we posted a blog entry about how Twitter affects Digg. The post was timely, had a short, direct title and was about a hot-button topic. (Stay tuned for an upcoming post on the ingredients of a good blog entry.) The following is a by-the-numbers look at how a blog entry goes from being posted to becoming well-read on the Internet.
First, @invoke tweeted about the post, and a notification was sent to everyone who subscribes to Invoke’s RSS feed. Staff members retweeted the post to their friends. The post contained an interview with an influential Twitter user, Zaibatsu, who tweeted it to his friends. Within an hour, this particular entry on Invoke’s blog received 500 visits.
Soon after the post was tweeted, a chain reaction began. Twitter users began to retweet the post. Retweets continued for two weeks. Influential Twitterers like @copyblogger and @lyndoman got on board. All told, we reached an estimated 814,298 pairs of eyeballs through Twitter.
A by-product of our post becoming popular on Twitter was that it became popular on Digg and StumbleUpon. At last count, we had 202 diggs with 12 comments. On StumbleUpon, we got 27 “thumbs up”, and 4 reviews. Four blogs eventually cited this post as an authority on how Twitter relates to Digg. It was also discussed on The DrillDown podcast.
What was the result of all this attention? Since February 19, this post has been viewed approximately 2500 times. Site views have primarily been driven by Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Digg, in that order. The average visitor time spent on the post page has been 3 minutes vs the 1:30 average spent on our site. And we are the #1 ranked site on Google for the phrase “How Twitter Affects Digg.”
We felt these numbers provided a useful miniature case study about what happens as a blog post becomes popular.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
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February 19th, 2010 at 1:17 am
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