FAQ:How do I get more traffic for my board?
So you want more traffic for your board
One way to do that is through Twitter. My research finds that, on average, every tweet generates 2.3 views. You can manually tweet a post by clicking the tweet button on an individual message. That works well and the tweet is optimized to be more Twitter friendly. Bracket tags are stripped out and a dollar sign is placed in front of any stock symbols found. A dollar sign is the Twitter convention for identifying a stock symbol. If you want your stock to show up broadly in Twitter search, put a dollar sign in front of it.
Yes, that's good, but how can I automate this?
The easiest way to automate posting to Twitter is by use of the RSS feed. Each board has an RSS feed that has been optimized to be Twitter friendly. There is a link to it right after the board name on the board page (the icon says RSS - pretty obvious). There are services available that will take the RSS feed and post it to Twitter for you automatically.
Here's a few that I'm aware of:
Of these, the one that I liked the most was dlvr.it.
So how do I do use dlvr.it?
First, watch the instructional video on their home page. It walks you through the basics. You'll need to register with them (it's free) and you'll need to register at Twitter (also free).
Once you've done the basic setup, edit your Source (the board feed).
On the Feed Update tab
- Set Feed Update Period to "Every 15 minutes" for most boards. If posting is slower, adjust down as necessary. This is the most frequent update that dlvr.it allows.
- Set Maximum Number of Items per update period to 10.
- Set Maximum Number of Items to Post Per Day to 250 (this is as big as they'll allow).
On the Item Text tab
- Set Start Items with - the name of the board followed by a colon. There is a maximum of 20 characters allowed here. You may need to do some editing down of the board name.
On the Filters tab
This is optional. If you only want to post tweets that have a stock symbol, which realistically are the only ones that people will find and click on in Twitter Search, then
- In Posted Items Must Contain All The Terms - put a dollar sign. This will exclude all posts that don't contain a marked ticker symbol.
There are other things you can tinker with but this should get you going. Be sure and look at the Stats section, it's really fascinating.
