My Hopes and Dreams for a Website Nightmare

People who manage websites know about bounce rates. For those of you who don't, bounce rate is a measure of how people use your site. A script starts a timer when they access a page and stops when they leave. If they leave within a minute (usually), they "bounced."

The general goal for normal people is to aim for 0% bounce. It's an impossible goal. Still, it's normally a worthy goal for normal people.

The nightmare scenario is a 100% bounce rate. 

A 100% bounce rate usually means that no one is interested in your site. They pop on, see nothing of interest and pop right back off.

It's normal for normal people to avoid that nightmare.

I ain't normal. 

That 100% bounce rate is what I'm hoping for.  

Why?

Am I crazy?

Am I stark raving mad?

Am I lying through my teeth?

I'd answer, "Quite possibly," for the first two questions and, "No," for the third.

Why I Hope and Dream about a 100% Bounce Rate on www.myTweetPack.com

I know I have just about as much chance of reaching my goal as everyone else has in reaching their goal of 0%. That is to say, none of us has a snowball's chance in Hell.

We still try.

But this post is not about why we try. It's about why my goal is diametrically opposed to everyone else's.

www.myTweetPack.com is not really a website. It's cloud software. Its reason for being is to reduce the time we spend on daily social media tasks. 

The less time it takes to do stuff, the less time you need to be on www.myTweetPack.com. 

In a perfect world, you would hop in, do your stuff and hop right back out. 

That's why 100% bounce rate is my ideal.

We're not quite there yet, but we're getting close.

Every day, I use our built-in packSupport scripts to review how users actually use the system. 

Our Live Chat function monitors the pages people visit in real-time. I take note of which pages and scripts people spend time on.

I mark those pages and scripts for review. 

I'm always looking for ways to speed things up. The faster you are in and out, the closer I get to my goal of 100% bounce rate. The closer you get to your goal of zero time spent managing your accounts.

What we've done so far

Member time spent on www.myTweetPack.com falls under one of three general categories. 

1 - Set-Up: Set-up takes a while, but once done, it's done. There isn't much we can do to speed it up. If you see that the Live Chat is active, check if it's me. 

If I'm at my computer, I'm usually on. I'll walk you through the process so you start on the right foot.

2 - Maintenance: Maintenance is done as needed. The system will follow and unfollow those people you tell it to follow or unfollow. It won't decide on its own. 

We set things up to run cumulatively. You can spend fifteen minutes or so a month building up lists of follows, unfollows, and retweets. Then the system will dutifully obey your commands. 

Many functions do double duty. When we scan your micro-influencer tweets for potential retweets, we also pull in potential follows. The same is true when we scan who mentions or retweets your micro-influencers (we call them Alpha Wolves)

The To-Do list and the EZ-Shortcuts list page sped things up in a big way. Everything you need to do is easily accessible. The To-Do list even offers suggestions on what needs be done.

3 - Finding Things to Tweet: This was the single largest use of member time. Notice I used the past tense. Members would post. Store the post as a tweet in www.myTweetPack.com, then schedule it out.

We embraced a one-and-done philosophy instead. 

Members no longer need to store their posts. Instead, members link their post pages to the system. 

They can link blogs and/or beBee articles and/or LinkedIn articles and/or Medium articles and/or Squarespace pages (including podcasts and eCommerce) and/or YouTube videos. 

Contributors (only) can link to Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, HuffPost, and The Good Men Project.

If RSS or ATOM feeds exist, we link them in. If they don't, we create them. We are now looking at pulling in podcasts from iTunes. Feel free to offer your suggestions in the comments.

That means that members just need to create content. They can leave the rest to us.

We poll the feed. We find the post. We pull it in as a tweet. We schedule out promo tweets.

Member time spent = 0 minutes.

As an aside feeds also created another "nightmare" scenario that is a good thing for us. Site visits dropped like a stone. Yay! There's no need to visit if the system does the work for you.

For multiple account managers: We added the ability to share tweet campaigns between connected accounts. Now, everything in @myTweetPack 's "Wolf Howls Blog" campaign is rebuilt as a retweet and added to @PaulCroubalian and @RockSmallBiz. 

Member time spent = a few seconds, once.

Because, sometimes, Life gets in the way: We added an autofill Tweets from inventory script. Members set a minimum number of Daily Tweets. The system will pick enough tweets from inventory to make up the difference between that minimum and what is scheduled for that day.

Member time spent = 0 minutes.

There's still room for improvement. 

Your posts are the easy part. We know where they'll be. We go get them automatically.

The hard part is speeding up the process of storing and scheduling Share-to-Twitter links that you like. No one likes a me-me-me feed.

It's nice to mix things up, but we have no way of knowing what you'll like and when.

Auto-Retweeting micro-influencer tweets was a step in the right direction. So was our "Store and Schedule in One Shot" script. 

Then we took a misstep. It wasn't something anyone would notice.

We started on a Google Chrome App that would follow you as you visited sites, any site. The idea was that you could click a Share-to-Twitter link, right click in the pop-up and select "Push to TweetPack."

The Chrome app would store the tweet in www.myTweetPack.com and schedule it for you. 

Again, member time = 0. That's my idea of perfection.

Then Google announced that they would stop supporting Apps on anything but Chrome OS and Android. That means that over 80% of members won't be able to use it.

Ooops.

We need to scrap that Chrome App. We'll start over as a Chrome extension, (or maybe a series of extensions that will all be in one context menu?). 

We'll get there. 

Until we do, I'll continue to hope and dream of my website's 100% bounce rate. While I'm at it, maybe I should hope and dream for 0 page views too?

I think that would be a great thing.

Cheers

image credit:  sleep paralysis succubus by nellek14 on deviantart

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