How Skittles Candy Increased Website Hits by 1332% In One Day!
Overview of this week's e-Newsletter
Over the past month we've got behind on sending out our weekly newsletter but we wanted to let you know we're still here and we're still going strong. So without further ado let's look at how Skittles amazingly increased their website hits by 1332% in one day!

Recently there has been a lot of buzz going around the internet about sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and how they can increase traffic to your site. Surprisingly these sites are part of the puzzle on how Skittles increased their hits. So this week let's take a deeper look at how Skittles used these types of sites and how you too can use them to leverage more visitors to your website.

What is Facebook, Twitter and MySpace?
Find out what Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are.
Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are each categorized as a type of website which is called "social media". Social media is a website that allows users to have some sort of social interaction with other users. For example users might be able to post a web page about them self and comment on other user's personal pages - thus creating interaction between visitors through comments.

Each site (Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) operate and allow social interaction in a different ways.

Facebook - Allows you to setup a profile page and comment back and forth on your friends profile pages. Also allows you to create groups and pages about a company or product and have users/friends optin to support or be part of that group.

Twitter - With Twitter you create an account where you can post quick statements (a sentence or few words) about what your doing or interesting tidbits to your account's profile page. Users tend to follow other users and see what they are going or read the interesting one lines they posted.

MySpace - Similar to Facebook, this site allows you to create a profile page and then you can comment back and forth on your friends profiles. Again this site, just like Facebook, allows you to create company or product pages that users can be optin to, support or comment on.

What Did Skittles Do To Get A 1332% Increase?
What Skittles candy company did to increase their website hits by 1332%?
Skittles amazingly increased their visitors this past week by leveraging users from Twitter to visit their site and to post comments on their accounts about Skittles. Their success comes from a marketing idea to have recent messages from Twitter that other users where writing about Skittles to be displayed on Skittles' home page. They did this through Twitter's search feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter and it's search feature, Twitter has a search feature that lets you search all entries/posts/comments of every user for a particular keyword or phrase. Skittles used this search feature and basically copying and displayed results from Twitter on their own website for the keyword "skittles" in real time.

It's an interesting marketing trick as it got lots of users to post comments about skittles on their Twitter accounts so that they could show up on Skittle's home page. In addition it generated many other users to visit the Skittle's website to see if their posts showed up on the home page. And on top of that it created a buzz around the Internet because of it's ingenuous idea. Although it's probably not the marketing tactic you'll want to use for your site. But this can give us incite into how powerful using these social media sites can be. Therefore if one could come up with a good marketing strategy using one of these social media sites you too could quickly increase visitors to your site and the best part is that these social media sites are all free.

Another note on social media and web traffic; I've seen many companies set up pages or groups on Facebook and uses these to send out mass messages to users that opted in. For various industries this too seems to be a workable tactic and could be something you might want to start using.

Final Words
Ending comments

And as always, look for next week's newsletter where we hope to provide you with more useful tips and advice. If you have any suggestions about topics you would like to hear more about please send us an email with your thoughts.