If you have been following my Twitter stream for a while, you may have noticed I that exclusively use bit.ly for my links

If you were especially paying attention, you also noticed that I sometimes replace the Tinyurl and is.gd links with bit.ly links when I re-tweet someone’s interesting thoughts and links. I also use #hashtags extensively when I either produce or re-tweet content.

In fact, every single link in this article is a bit.ly link.

Click to Re-Tweet about this article to your friends

Why would I go through all this trouble?

Because most URL shortening services do not feature analytics, such as the venerable Tinyurl (by my friend @Unigilby) and other newer services, I do not interfere with a link originator’s analytics when I replace them with a trackable bit.ly link. In fact, due to a very nifty feature that appears to be unique to bit.ly, I actually help the link originator by providing her with the option to view analytics of what happens to her shared content after I share it with my network of followers.

Bit.ly (@bitly) is not the only platform that permits me to track Twitter content. I am also aware of ow.ly (part of @Hootsuite), @burnurl (@mashable’s @adamostrow Adam Ostrow), @budurl, @Tweetburner, and I am sure there are other similar technologies.

As this article is about tracking and monetizing viral distribution of content, I did not write it for beginners. Please read my other Twitter articles for a gentle introduction to Twitter and why it is so useful.

I chose to use Bit.ly because it doesn’t interfere with URLs and is fully transparent to the user. The same can’t be said about BurnUrl, and Ow.ly.

Twitter is an ideal platform for viral content distribution

Let me first define “viral”

In my view, viral distribution occurs when initial content is deemed sufficiently valuable that it gets redistributed without my continued participation. There are many well-known mega-viral hits, such as the Susan Boyle phenomenon, but many of us would also be very pleased with an extra few hundred or a few thousand new highly targeted and keenly interested visitors to our website. Getting that traffic continuously without doing any work is even better, right?

I think this article carries enough value, even though it is very long and text-heavy, that other marketers will want to re-distribute it further.

What is re-tweeting

“Re-tweeting” with E-mail

In the old days, I wrote a newsletter, sent it to your e-mail account, prayed that you will receive it and actually open it, you read it, hopefully liked it, and then forwarded it to your business associates by manually choosing their names from your address book. Optionally, you had a distribution list setup to which you could easily forward interesting e-mail messages.

Twitter version

I wrote an article, tweeted it with a short URL, you read it, liked it, and with a single click re-tweeted it to your entire network of followers. As a reminder, in order to follow you they don’t need to get your approval.

The message you saw related to this message is “Create, Track & Monetize VIRAL marketing content on Twitter http://bit.ly/xPvT7 #bitly #webanalytics #viralmarketing”

Woah, what just happened?!

You clicked one button, and all of a sudden everyone who follows you sees the message. Not only that, because you sent that message, it carries your authoritative endorsement that you found that content and its sender to be sufficiently valuable as to re-distribute it to potentially the entire world.

As of this writing, I have over 600 followers. Some of my followers have literally tens of thousands of followers and substantial influence. Within minutes, my message, if it is sufficiently compelling, can achieve viral scale of distribution.

There is more to it, however, it does not have to happen immediately. Because I use techniques that I am sharing with you today, the information does not have to go viral immediately. The snowball effect may take time and may require multiple re-starts.

People who re-tweet you are extremely likely to also start following you. I personally have retweeted someone’s interesting link more than once when I saw sufficient value and it came up again in my Twitter stream.

One last thing about re-tweeting

A re-tweet should never start with an @. It can start with anything but @. If you do start a re-tweet with an @, the only people who will see that re-tweet are those who are also following that person. That dramatically reduces the impact of a re-tweet to almost zero. It does not make it zero, but it won’t help the author as much as adding “RT” in the beginning of the message would. The only added value to that tweet will be your reputation and the time shifting effect, which may trigger additional re-tweets. You can solve this dilemma for new users with a one-click Retweet link in your content as I will explain later.

In fact, if you liked this article, why not Tweet about it now (opens in a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

There are six main vectors for viral distribution within Twitter itself

Direct

I wrote the tweet “Create, Track & Monetize VIRAL marketing content on Twitter http://bit.ly/xPvT7 #bitly #webanalytics #viralmarketing” to promote this article. Let us suppose that only one of my hundreds of followers likes it and re-tweets it. In my case, I need to limit my tweets to 127 characters to facilitate re-tweets (“RT @wiseleo: “is 13 chars, and don’t forget the space although you can drop the colon after RT @username:). We want to make this as painless as possible for the re-tweeter. This primary vector is most effective if you have a substantial audience of engaged followers who would be interested in this content. You only need one re-tweet to start the chain reaction, but more re-tweets will give your message better opportunity to infect the networks.

If you want to really have some fun with this, after you post your general tweet, also @ a few selected users to whom your message is highly relevant with a shoutout. If someone inspired you to write an article, for example, they will probably be thrilled to receive it. Ask your Twitter friends to specifically help you get the word out. If it’s news-worthy, include a few bloggers and journalists. Think of your tweet as a nano press-release. Be very selective as you really want to trigger a natural viral wave without being perceived as a spammer.

Don’t do this “Check this out an awesome article http://example.com @aplusk @oprah @guykawasaki @scobleizer @tweetmeme #RandomCurrentTrendingTopic” – you get the point.

Indirect search

I wrote something, someone searches for those words and re-tweets it. If you include interesting keywords as part of your tweet, chances are it will show up in the search results. Twitter has a real-time search platform that works quite well. It is used not only by the website, but also by various advanced Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Twhirl, Seesmic Desktop, and others.

A re-tweet will bring a copy of your original message back to the top.

Hashtags search

I wrote something, tagged it with descriptive #hashtags, someone follows or searches for that hashtag and re-tweets it. This article is tagged with #bitly #webanalytics and #viralmarketing. I won’t rehash my article about hashtags, but I will mention that #bitly will have a first page of search results lifetime of about 30 days and #webanalytics will have a lifetime of 5 days. The hashtag #viralmarketing is also rarely used, so the article would probably remain easy to find for a very long time for those who know how to look for #viralmarketing. As a bonus, it will also be found for searches on #viral.

We only have 140 characters and in that space we have to place both hashtags and your viral hook. That is very tricky, but certainly doable. In this example, I still have 11 characters to spare. That is enough space for a double-retweet or for another hashtag. Shorter tweets are easier to read. They need to be keyword-saturated. In my case, the hook is that I explain how to create viral content and also monetize it.

Recent tweets of someone whom you just followed

When you decide to see if someone is worth following, you will usually click on them and see their last 20 tweets. It is possible that you will spot a tweet that someone has already re-tweeted and re-tweet it again.

This restarts the cycle of that particular message showing up in search streams and the hashtag search.

Trending topics

If you create a story that becomes so popular as to be a top-10 trending topic on Twitter, you will see massive distribution. If your content adds value to an already trending topic, you are looking at a massive viral opportunity as it will probably be instantly re-tweeted. You do not need to create a trending topic to reap its effect.

Do not attach a hashtag of a trending topic to an irrelevant article! It will scroll off the screen quickly and show up as evidence when someone happens to find your tweet in the search results. You wouldn’t want to do business with a spammer, so don’t be one.

Automated re-tweet bots

I didn’t even realize this vector existed until I tripped one of them with this article.

So, this is a special shoutout to @smmguide for re-tweeting this article automatically whenever someone re-tweets it. If you follow the #smm hashtag, you’ll see that this bot will re-tweet me.

I will research and figure out other re-tweet bots.

Go ahead and try it

Tweet about it

Additionally, there are auxiliary vectors for viral distribution

Synchronization

Some of us use Twitter -> Facebook and Twitter -> Friendfeed and other multiple social networks status managers.

As that content hits 3-rd party sites, it shows up in various forms. Because the Bit.ly URL remains intact, I can continue to track the distribution of my content long after it leaves the Twitterverse.

Internal viral distribution in third-party services

What I post on my Twitter stream also winds up as my Facebook status and my Yahoo Messenger status. Facebook is legendary for its viral distribution vectors. If you start the viral distribution on Twitter, you will likely hit a lot more Facebook accounts in the first wave than if you started it on Facebook. Instead of hoping that just your friends will like what you wrote or that a group wall post will gain traction, you will now have multiple points of entry into the Facebook ecosystem.

As your tweet continues to trigger waves through additional vectors, it will continue to have a ripple effect on Facebook.

Search engines

This one is simple and yet vital. A visitor stumbles onto your website from Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Ask and hits the re-tweet button. The cycle begins anew.

If you are distributing a video

You may also trigger a multi-wave viral effect on Youtube if the content you wish to spread happens to be a Youtube video. Both Twitter -> Youtube and Twitter -> Facebook -> Youtube vectors will trigger substantially powerful waves of their own, especially considering that Youtube has its own viral distribution features to send your video back to Facebook or Twitter. Note, however, that hashtags and other portions of your tweet may get lost at this point.

The role of Twhirl and Bit.ly

Bit.ly has a very nifty feature – if you create an account at Bit.ly, you can get an API key. Any link shortened with that API key gets attached to your username. If you guessed that my page is wiseleo.bit.ly, you are right! Every link I shorten becomes available to me for additional analysis.

You may not know this, but if you take any Bit.ly URL and add a + to the end of it, you will be able to view that link’s click analytics. It currently does not matter whether that link is yours and enables very interesting scenarios as I explain further. This article’s URL is http://bit.ly/xPvT7 and so its info page is http://bit.ly/xPvT7+.

Twhirl is my favorite Twitter client for many reasons. One of them is the ability to use the Bit.ly API key to not only shorten the URLs but also enable individual tracking on my custom dashboard on wiseleo.bit.ly. When I tweet, I simply get whatever the expanded URL is, shrink it with Twhirl, and I am done. I never have to bother with bookmarklets or going to the actual Bit.ly site.

Aggregate analytics in Bit.ly

This to me is a killer feature and I haven’t found any other service that offers it. Even though your original tweet was opened and then re-tweeted by someone with a different URL shortening service, if someone else shrinks that URL once again with Bit.ly, you will once again have tracking for your URL. Even more interestingly, you can track the stats of your competitors, if they choose to be as transparent about it.

Considering the popularity of Bit.ly, that is a very likely scenario. In fact, you may actually see who liked your content enough to do you a favor and re-shrink it with Bit.ly. It will associate the user’s name with the new Bit.ly URL.

Accuracy of Bit.ly analytics.

In my experience, there are too many factors that can throw off the accuracy of this service. Specially, services that expand shortened URLs may create false clicks. However, let’s look at the big picture. If you are promoting your own content, you likely already have your own analytics system that is far more accurate than any 3rd party tool anyway. If you are tracking 3-rd party clicks, there isn’t much else you can do.

Bit.ly accuracy does not really matter

What we want to know is where are we in the current wave. Do we need to re-start the process from the beginning? Are we still being actively re-tweeted? Don’t be alarmed if your bit.ly analytics do not precisely match your access_log results. A HEAD request instead of a GET request, which is a common scenario when expanding compressed URLs, can create such discrepancies.

We are looking at general trends and those will be fairly obvious.

Triggering additional waves

You probably noticed that I said with certainty how long a particular tweet will remain searchable. This is relatively simple to find out. Simply run a search for your selected hashtag on search.twitter.com and notice the age of the oldest tweet. Your tweet will probably have a similar lifespan on the first page of search results.

You can attempt to re-trigger a wave after a tweet rolls off the page. If you choose your hashtags wisely, it should not be necessary. Nevertheless, it can be an interesting experiment. I don’t recommend re-tweeting the same link more than once every 20 tweets.  Normal Twitter usage for most of us will make that a non-issue, but it would look tacky if the same message appeared several times in your recent tweets.

Monetization!

I don’t know about you and how altruistic you may be, but everything I write and create is designed to eventually be monetized. I can monetize just about everything, whether it would be directly or indirectly. Directly – you will buy something that I sell on one of my websites. Indirectly – you will follow me on Twitter, refer me to your friends, subscribe to my mailing list, invite me to speak to your group, buy one of my cross-promoted products – in short agree to be marketed to by me in the future.

Monetizing high traffic articles

Monetizing text is text-book simple – add some adsense or higher paying ads, wrap it into an ebook, turn it into a seminar, add interstitial ads, and there are many other possibilities. Ordinarily, having Adsense ads on a little-visited blog is pointless. In fact, I removed ads from one of my websites last night because the traffic was insufficient to bother with them. If, however, what you wrote goes massively viral, it may actually make sense to revisit that page and add monetization features.

You will make a lot more money if you can figure out how to convert your readers into buyers of your products or services rather than serving them third-party ads.

At the very least, you would want to add some related articles. If you have a seminar that expands on this topic, add the “Register now” button in the post. If  you have an e-book, link to buy it with one click. Once your content goes viral, you should definitely monetize it while it’s red-hot.

Be sure not to forget to add a re-tweet button with your desired message in the body of your text.

Monetizing high traffic videos

If you are promoting video content that you wish to monetize, you may want to use a premium video distribution platform, such as Ooyala (@ooyala). It’s hard enough to produce viral video content. I humbly propose that you should be paid for it! If there is anyone in the audience who disagrees with my proposal, you are welcome to leave now.

Did you know that no one (neither Youtube nor ITV, principal parties to benefit from this) made a single cent from Susan Boyle’s sensational video on Youtube for at least the first 100,000,000 views? In fact, there are still no ads on that or any of her videos! They couldn’t agree how to split the money, so they got none of it.

With Youtube, your only option to monetize is to link elsewhere from the more info box.

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@wiseleo) writes about social media and other topics of interest on http://Knyshov.com

If you liked this article, why not Tweet about it now (opens in a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

Licensed under Creative Commons Content License: BY-ND

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