PayWithaTweet (hereby known as PWaT) is a service that enables web publishers to give visitors content in exchange for a Tweet or Facebook share. In this post, I will share my experience with PWaT, tweet and CTR data, and how you can use this tool to go viral and influence search engine results.

What is PayWithaTweet?

The creators of PWaT have made a great video explaining the concept and some of its uses:

The Experiment: Tweet for an Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet

I created an Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet during one of our Portent 'Hack Days.' I wanted to distribute the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet far and wide – and PayWithATweet was something I always wanted to experiment with.

The Set Up

After creating my Google Analytics Cheat Sheet, I uploaded it to WordPress and created the PWaT button.

When you use PWaT, you get to write the message that is tweeted when visitors download your file.

I did some quick keyword research (turns out "Cheat Sheet" is more popular than "Cheatsheet"). I also thought Portent's strong brand in the internet marketing community would entice people to click through, so including Portent in the tweet was important.

I then did hashtag research: #Measure is a very popular web analytics hashtag, and I believed the #measure community would find the cheat sheet interesting and useful. So I needed to write a message that included all of these elements in only a few characters.

I set the PWaT Tweet Text to "Get the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet from Portent - #measure - http://bit.ly/mLBPht", and created a simple landing page. (My wise and generous boss Ian later added a screencap and made it better.) Then on Friday morning, I tweeted out the link, and asked some of my colleagues to do the same.

The Results

The Numbers

Because Twitter is a real-time medium, I took measurements at various times to watch the tweets spread.

I used bit.ly tracking to compile these metrics. You can see the bit.ly numbers yourself at the link's bit.ly information page - https://bitly.com/mLBPht+. (If you see any differences between the numbers in various graphics and references in this post, it's due to the time the numbers were taken.)

As of 5 PM on Saturday, 83 people have downloaded the cheat sheet for a tweet. There are four double tweets, and five of the tweets were from colleagues at Portent I asked to Tweet. This puts the organic Tweet count at 74 Tweets. The bit.ly link received 258 clicks, so 28.7% of the people clicking on the bit.ly decided to download the cheat sheet and Pay With a Tweet.

The landing page was probably the weakest part of the experiment. (The Kanye West reference in the first paragraph was an unsuccessful attempt at writing like Groupon.) I imagine had I created a stronger landing page and a stronger message, all of these metrics would be better. I'll come back to lessons learned in the "insights" section.

The Search Engine Impact

Major search engines index Twitter, and these social shares appear to be a ranking factor in both social search and traditional search.

Jen Lopez of SEOmoz has shown tweets have a substantial effect on search in her well known "beginner's guide" case study.

I was curious if we would see the same thing, so I looked at the search engine rankings of two terms – "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" and "Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet".

In Google (signed out, personalization off, but from both office and home machines), the post ranked almost immediately for "Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet." (It's apparently the only piece of content on the web optimized for that phrase.) However the SERP for "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" was dominated by Ian's last Google Analytics Cheat Sheet and pages linking to it.

On the first day (Friday), when the bulk of the tweets were occurring in real time, I didn't seen ay modified conventional results. I did see some Tweets being pulled in through 'social circle' search functionality.

However, on Saturday afternoon, I found that the landing page was now ranking in position eight for the term "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet."

Fascinated by the result, I used the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis Tool to analyze the "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" SERP:

By Sunday, the Cheat Sheet had received over 85 tweets. Now the page was appearing in position six for "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet."

And again, according to the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis tool, the page had the lowest domain and page authority in the SERP. The page has, to my knowledge, no inbound external links. Tweets are the page's only signs of quality and relevance.

Neither domain authority nor page authority is high enough for the page to rank for that phrase. While it's hard to control for personalization, I had signed out and added the "pws=0" string to the URL. I tried it on a variety of browsers - including some I don't use - and I received the same result.

With the standard SEO disclaimer (correlation does not equal causation, what works here may not work for you, this is not science nor does it claim to be), it seems that Twitter thru PayWithaTweet can influence Google search results.

At the time of this writing, the page is not ranking in Bing for 'Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet' or 'Google Analytics Cheat Sheet'. (In fact, the page isn't indexed at all in Bing.)

Insights for Future PayWithaTweet Projects

When to Use PayWithaTweet

If you have content you can give away to a Twitter or Facebook-using audience, PWaT is a great promotional option. Virtual goods, eBooks, mp3s, or coupon codes are great things to give away.

Justin Briggs had more ideas about what to do with PWaT:

Given these changes in search engine rank, it makes sense to do a PWaT promotion around high-traffic seasonal terms. For example, if you sell Mother's Day Flowers, a PWaT promotion for 5% off could help you rank for the highly competitive term "Mothers Days Flowers".

Keep in mind people can delete their tweet or share after they download the file. And in the case of a coupon code, there's nothing that would stop someone from sharing a coupon code with their friends, tweeting it themselves, or submitting it to a coupon site.

As always, you're playing with fire. Play carefully.

Start with a Big Audience

My PWaT experiment didn't really take off until Ian tweeted it to his 7,394 followers. You need to start your PWaT with a big Twitter audience.

If you don't have a big Twitter audience, you need to get someone that does to Tweet the initial link. This may be a good time to use ad.ly’s sponsored Tweets.

Include a Popular Hashtag in Your Tweet

I included the #measure hashtag in the PWaT message. The right hashtag gets your message in front of a large number of the right people. Use hashtags.org to find the most active hashstags in your niche.

Make a Great Landing Page

Landing pages are really important to the success of your PayWithaTweet initiative. In my experiment with PWaT, this is probably the thing I did the worst – I imagine had I improved the landing page, we could've gotten more than 125 tweets.

Your landing page has to entice people to download the content and share it with their friends, while not giving the piece away for free. As they say, people don't buy the cow when they can get the milk for free.

It's also important to find a way to show social proof – how many other people are grabbing your giveaway for a tweet. Using Twitter's Search Widget set to grab your PWaT tweets and showing them on the landing page is a great way to do this.

PayWithaTweet Uses an iFrame – Make Sure Your Publishing Methods Supports Embedding an iFrame

The PWaT button appears in an iFrame. There's no other way to implement it (to my knowledge). If you use a CMS that strips out iFrames (like WordPress), be prepared for this. We used the iFrame WordPress Plugin, which worked like a charm.

Use the Science of Retweets to Optimize Your Message

Social media experts (most notably Dan Zarella) have done a great deal of research on what kinds of messages get retweeted. Use this research in writing your PWaT message for maximum social reach.

• Use words and phrases like "New" "Please retweet" "How To" "Check Out", and other terms that draw more retweets
• Use Colons – People seem to like to tweets with colons over tweets with semi-colons or other punctuation
• Noon to 6 PM seem to be the golden hours for Retweeting
• Mondays and Fridays are the best days for Retweets, so launch your PWaT content on those days

Thanks for reading, and I'll answer any questions in the comments.

(I'd also like to thank my colleagues at Portent who helped with this project - Michael for editing the cheatsheet, Anna for figuring out how to embed iFrames in WordPress, Ian, Doug, Josh, and Aaron for tweeting, and of course my bosses, Ian, Tracy, and Elizabeth, for letting me do this.)