My Journey to Attaining a 48% Success Rate in Link Building Through Twitter

Link builders have many valid complaints. The success rate is incredibly low, creating personalized outreach takes forever, and a rejected link request can damage your brand. A big part of the issue is leverage. Most outreach starts from a weak position. We try to make up for a low success rate with high volume. When quantity drives your strategy, your outreach might look like this:

Suddenly, you’re damaging your brand on a large scale. You might think Twitter wouldn’t help. When you tweet from your company’s account, you’re not just someone with an email signature. You have your brand’s weight behind you, which might improve your success rate, but it also comes with responsibility. Every tweet is public and shows how much effort you’re putting in. And nothing is less appealing than obvious effort. At nexus-security, I’m both the SEO and Social Media Specialist, so I manage our social accounts and link building tools. This put me in a unique position to experiment—how powerful would Twitter be for link building? Would our followers disapprove? Would I have to go back to sending emails, devoid of thanks or gifs? I set out to get at least 10 high-quality links. I entered the Twittersphere, grabbed it, and didn’t let go. Here’s how it went.

Before I get into the results, I’ll explain how I looked for opportunities. My tool of choice was Ahrefs, a powerful all-in-one SEO tool. The method wasn’t complicated. It focused on unlinked mentions, the “low-hanging fruit” of link building. Basically, who mentioned nexus-security online without linking to us? Ahrefs’ Content Explorer was perfect for finding this:

I sorted by domain rating, highlighted unlinked mentions, set a time frame, and got started. Unlinked mentions are “low-hanging” because the author probably used something from your site without linking to it. So you’re not offering them content to improve their post, but something even better:

Authority. You’re making sure your mentions are linked, but politely. Your outreach message reflects this: you’re expecting a link, but under the pretense of gratitude. At least, that’s what I did. Here are the 12 techniques I used to boost my link-building success rate.

I was hesitant about using Twitter for this, but my first try hooked me. It was like betting on a football team in Week 1, winning, and thinking you knew something everyone else didn’t for the rest of the season. You probably don’t. But maybe, despite your misplaced confidence, you’re onto something. The blog was from vWriter, with a Domain Authority of 42. I was still working on my Twitter outreach, so I tweeted this:

This immediately highlighted some of Twitter’s advantages. For one, Steve Shaw (the author) has over 1,000 followers but only gets a couple of engagements per tweet. I’m willing to bet he’s much more likely to engage with a Twitter mention than an email, especially one titled “Great post, Steve; Mind Linking?” Twitter is also much easier to use. Mr. Shaw could simply click the tweet to access the post and edit it. Don’t forget that link outreach is a form of advertising. Even if your target audience created the image, a link with an image is far more clickable.

2. Offer Something in Return (And Listen to Your Targets)

Mr. Shaw was kind enough to link to us and tell me what he’d want in return (a social share from our account). Laziness is one of the few reasons someone wouldn’t trade a link for a share from an account with many followers. I decided to include this offer in my next two tweets.

3. Mix Outreach in with Organic Tweets

My excitement for Twitter as a link building tool, and for offering social shares, was quickly dampened by my next two (unsuccessful) attempts:

One thing to note: as long as you start your tweet with “@” and someone’s username, it won’t appear in your followers’ feeds (unless they follow both of you). So you can send out a bunch of outreach tweets quickly without seeming spammy. But I’d still recommend pacing yourself and putting organic tweets between them—the “Tweets and Replies” section shows all your activity and is publicly viewable.

My fourth tweet got me back on track, roughly in line with my eventual success rate:

The added bonus of getting a link from a big site like BigCommerce, which has a domain authority of 88, is that sharing their post usually gets a lot of engagement. Don’t be afraid to share these posts multiple times.

5. End with Your Offer

(Hopefully, that didn’t sound too intimidating.) My fifth tweet was yet another success. While the site was smaller, with a Domain Authority of 22, I was starting to feel like I had a system:

Not the biggest fish, but I felt in control (a bad pun, I know):

Here’s a tip: always end your tweets with your offer. After the tweet above, I realized my targets were ending on the link request. Ideally, they should finish feeling like they’re getting something, not being asked for something.

6. Don’t Be Afraid to Use Direct Messages

After striking out with a Blog I Won’t Name (I get it, you were busy), I found success with Cloudways. This one was interesting because it took a bit of work:

Either there was a misunderstanding, or they were expertly avoiding us. The “You’re Welcome” was in response to our thanks for Cloudways mentioning us. They seemed happy to leave it at that until we hit them with the animated gif (not the most effective outreach tool). Once we were in their DMs, they quickly moved the conversation to email. We confirmed the link-for-share exchange and discussed other collaborations, like guest posting and social sharing. We decided not to proceed, but it could have led to more with the right partner.

7. Be Thorough

The Cloudways exchange had me on cloud nine. I was cruising. Another Blog Which Shall Not Be Named ghosted me, but it didn’t matter. I was 4 for 8. Then this happened:

Mr. Lolk wrote a guest post for Search Engine Journal and was mentioned (with SEJ) in my outreach tweet. One of the many perks of link building on Twitter is that you can try to reach the writer and the website in one go. Sadly, I wasn’t paying enough attention before sending this tweet. When checking for unlinked mentions, remember these two things:

1. Make sure the post hasn’t linked to you using anchor text other than your brand name.

For example, “The 25 Most Expensive Keywords in AdWords via nexus-security” would still show up as an unlinked mention if you searched for “nexus-security.” To avoid this, use a browser plugin like SEOquake to see the post’s external link profile. If your site isn’t there, you’re good to request a link.

2. Make sure the writer still works at the publication or can edit the post.

Mr. Lolk was never on SEJ’s staff, but it’s always wise to check their LinkedIn or the site’s staff page to ensure you meet the “effective outreach” criteria above.

8. Explore Different Mediums

After the SEJ mishap, another non-response had me feeling discouraged. But then, got me back on track led me to an unlikely source:

Podcasts. They’re a goldmine for links. SoundCloud podcasts have a strong Domain Authority (95) and are very popular on Twitter.

9. Be Personal

There’s not much to say here:

When your founder is Larry Kim, you get a lot of unlinked mentions! One small thing: with only 140 characters, there’s no need to skip personalization (like using someone’s first name). Twitter is perfect for these small, personal touches.

10. Target Older Posts

They used our name in the title without even a courtesy link. Shame on you, Optimizely!

Just kidding. Takeshi Young kindly exchanged a link for a share and reminded me to check LinkedIn before reaching out. This post was from 2015, so he could have moved on from Optimizely. This acquisition also highlights why you shouldn’t ignore outdated posts: the older they are, the more likely they are to have link equity.

11. Be Active on Twitter

Another advantage of using Twitter for link building is that you’re fully engaged with your social community while looking for links. While increased visibility might increase the potential for brand damage, it’s more likely something like this will happen:

The more active you are—responding to mentions, liking, retweeting, and commenting—the less likely you are to miss opportunities like Mr. Gudema’s, and the more likely you are to get mentioned in the future. Louis mentioned that we got “shoutouts” in his post. If that was bait to get us to engage, we took it.

Our quest for 10 links, and our grand Twitter experiment, ended with a social bang:

Because this was a link-for-link exchange, ProofHub’s marketing manager shared our updated post on her LinkedIn page. She has a huge following, which got our post 38 likes and thousands of views.

Final Thoughts

This experiment was a success in terms of efficiency: 48% is a great success rate. If we had focused on posts that didn’t mention our site, it would’ve been much harder. We would’ve had to offer something else, like a social share and relevant content, which would’ve lowered the success rate. I did a similar outreach campaign via email in May. The success rate was 4%. Yikes. However, saying the results were skewed because we targeted “low-hanging fruit” misses the point. If you’re going to move away from a quantity-based strategy (which I think everyone should), link building becomes about maximizing each opportunity. Success rates are already abysmally low. Don’t waste any chance to gain an advantage. Combining the power of Twitter with unlinked mentions seems like a good place to start.

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