Last night I posted a reply on Twitter to John Gruber who was having problems with his iPhone sync taking hours. I pointed John at my recently posted article on the fix that I had found to my example of this particular problem. Thinking no more of it I went to bed. This morning I woke to find my site had seen a huge surge in hits during the night, todays total so far is approaching 3,000 hits which is 30 times my average daily traffic.
Presumably all the Twitter community who follow John had decided to have a look at my link as well resulting in lots of traffic and comments to this article. To be honest I have had a Twitter account for some time and have only really dabbled with it. I never expected that it could be used to drive traffic to a web site in this sort of way.
I suppose it just shows that social networks are immensely powerful tools for marketing and viral spread of information. It has certainly made me think about Twitter in a whole new light.
UPDATE : It seems on further examination that the traffic is coming from Johns very popular website http://daringfireball.net and not Twitter as I first thought. Still I guess I wuoldnt have got the link from John if I hadn’t posted on Twitter so it amounts to the same result in the end. If anything in fact the result is better, Johns site has more stiction than Twitter ( it will be around longer ) so hopefully will be more beneficial long term.
FURTHER UPDATE : Word is spreading. After DaringFireball.net linked to me Ars Technica have now picked it up and run a post in the Infinite Loop ! All in one day… Wow.
