While discussing Twitter with various marketers recently, I’ve often heard the complaint that:

“I just don’t get a lot of traffic from Twitter. It’s great for other things, but it doesn’t generate many site visitors.”

To which my brain silently responds:

“You actually generate a TON of traffic through Twitter…you just generate it for other people’s websites.”

Let me explain.

Five Tweets
Let’s take a look at five resort tweets:

Stowemaking: From Water to Winter @StoweMtResort. See it here. #MtnOps #snowmaking http://t.co/TjhftRQ7Jr

— Stowe Mt Resort (@StoweMtResort) October 30, 2013

A one mile groomer is a sweet treat before Halloween. Let's hear it for October skiing and our snowmaking team! http://t.co/rnLH2wBW3Q

— Bretton Woods (@bretton_woods) October 30, 2013

Our mountain looks a bit different now than when we answered your Ask Bill questions last week! https://t.co/XrmlV2pd6H #northstarcalifornia

— Northstar California (@SkiNorthstar) October 30, 2013

Stellar new scene on this year's #skivermont poster. Get yours here –> http://t.co/DDuG4Qy93q #winterishere #stoked http://t.co/7j3qqeHKHO

— Ski Vermont (@ski_vermont) October 30, 2013

A glorious day indeed! #squawvalley http://t.co/UlDiEUk0Pb

— Squaw Valley (@SquawValley) October 30, 2013

As embedded tweets, they’ll likely show the much of the content inline. But don’t be fooled, in a normal Twitter feed where the vast majority of your tweets are read, it almost always takes one click to view the content.

Clicks are traffic moving to new pages. So where are they going?

The Traffic
The first tweet is generating traffic for YouTube. The second is generating traffic for TwitPic. The third Vimeo. The fourth for Ow.ly and the fifth for Instagram.

Long story short, resort accounts are generating thousands and thousands of website visitors every day for a hundred different sites.

Just not their own sites.

Easy Peasy
Now, let’s run back through the list and see which of those sites has easy-to-use embed codes for your content.

• YouTube: YES
• Vimeo: YES
• Instagram: YES
• Ow.ly: YES
• TwitPic: YES

See what I’m getting at? These services give marketers an easy way to provide clickers the same content but on their own websites.

The Tweak
Instead of sharing links to these sites, I’d start to embed all of my YouTube and Vimeo videos, photos and Instagrams, Vines and TwitPics onto my website in a blog post (one for each piece of content) and sharing the link to that post instead.

It will take you about a minute more but, instead of generating traffic for YouTube, it will generate traffic for your website. I’d do it for all content, but especially my own. Love that new GoPro video? Embed it on your site, then share it. Love that Instagram photo? Upload a new vid to YouTube? Embed it. Then share it. An article/post on your site can be nothing more than a video and it’s description.

“What about Facebook,” you say, “they show videos inline!” Same deal…it still takes a click. Just do what Joel does. An extra 30 seconds for an extra 100+ pageviews.

Embed Then Share
Say it with me. Embed it then share it.

Embed, then share.

That’s what I’d do.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.