There was a comment recently asking us about the 8BIT Network‘s twitter strategy and I thought I would outline what that was as explicitly as I possibly could so as to diffuse any further questions about something so unimportant.
Just kidding. Twitter is indeed a vital part of what we do to communicate our content but we don’t consider it absolutely necessary to our success.
But here’s how we’ve decided to use it as it relates to our blogs and content areas:
- Twitter appears to generate approximately 9-13% of our traffic on any given month. This is significant and we appreciate the traffic channel! Since our mission is to “Resource the Church” and we do that mostly through our content across the blogs our hope is that Twitter will help facilitate the exportation of that content around the internet to those that need it.
- We do not approach our Twitter accounts as places of deep community development. We actively monitor and respond to @replys and such but our hope is that our blogs become the “home base,” if you will, for community to develop.
- We currently follow everyone that follows us, giving them direct access to DM us at will. We curate our followers quarterly to kill spam and pornographers. This is neither a perfect practice nor method of execution but it is a reasonable one.
- They ultimately act as broadcast stations for our content, auto-tweeting our blog posts and resurfacing old content that is still both relevant and valuable. We’ve just started the latter practice and it has been phenomenal to see newer followers grab this content, add a comment (or two) and then pass that on to friends and those who need to know. This fulfills our mission perfectly.
- Our strategy isn’t perfect and we recognize that fully. We also operate with a very trim team and cannot be at all places at all times thus resulting in limited response times. We acknowledge this as well. We’re open to suggestions to make it better!
Hope that makes it pretty clear.
Some Suggestions on Following Us:
Of course, I can’t let you hang without some suggestions on how to best engage with us and our community at large! Here are some thoughts:
- Subscribe to the RSS Feeds – Choose the ones that you love and Subscribe to their RSS. This is the best way to get content right into your Reader. Forget Twitter if you think it’s too spammy!
- Subscribe via Email – We offer this choice too. We love that just as much!
- Follow us Strategically – Follow the accounts that you like the most that are relevant to the information you need the most!
- Follow @8BIT – For global network-wide coverage without the “From the Archives”. You should follow it for updates from our business blog too.
- Bookmark Us – For some this is the best strategy for them. Just put us in your daily bookmarks and enjoy us in the real.
Hope that helps!
Join Us in Fulfilling Our Mission:
Our Mission is to “Resource the Church”. Pretty simple, right? The best way that you can do this, especially as it relates to Twitter is to simply retweet our content and share it with others.
Not too hard, right? By doing this you align yourself intimately with where our hearts are and find our bottom-line motivation of doing what we do. It’s tough work building a business that’s never previously been built and your support, through comments, sharing, and traffic, help support what we do.
Never forget that we’re just like you: We’re average men and women trying to fulfill the great call of engaging the world with excellence in the small amount of time that we have on this earth. Many of us have given up our full time jobs to walk this road and more of us will make the sacrifice in the coming months.
This is our “Good Work,” this is our living, and we love it.
Finally, if you want a more intimate opportunity to follow the people behind 8BIT then head over to this site and follow the team at the bottom!
Thanks all!
Brian Notess says
Interesting stuff. 9-13% of your traffic was lower than I would have expected, but still significant.
Also, I love your mission: “Resource the Church”. That’s the first time I’ve heard it.
John Saddington says
sad…that’s what we’re all about!
BenJPickett says
Very interesting. Nice to see such a simple strategy and how some of the different thoughts and methods behind it are paying out for you.