By Marko Saric of How to Make My Blog
Twitter is a growing platform where bloggers can increase their site traffic and exposure by finding, getting in touch and providing value to people interested in their content and services. Twitter helps establish a link between you and your audience and should be a very important part of your online branding and marketing strategy.
Build a followers base
Concentrate on building a large number of followers. The more people that follow you and know what you are about, the more clicks and visits you will get to your site.
Track down twitterers that are interested in your field by using Twellow. Search for relevant keywords or go into the relevant directory and get a list of interested twitterers. Rank according to “followers count” to see the power users in your field.
An easy way to get people to follow you is to start following them first. When you follow someone, you will be listed in their profile in the “Followers” list so they will have a chance to take a look at your profile, see what you tweet about, what your interests are and what the URL of your site is.
Beware of the ratio between followers vs following
People tend to place large significance in the ratio of the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow. Following a disproportionately higher number of people than having followers will give a bad image and you might find it hard getting new followers.
Twitterers with more even numbers or a higher number of followers are seen as more trustworthy and influential as they have a high number of people interested in their tweets.
Brand yourself as an expert
Make sure to be consistent in your branding on different social media sites. Try to use same nickname, same avatar and publish related content on each. This way people will recognize you easier, and will know what you are about and what you stand for.
It is important to provide value to your followers in your tweets. You can do that by pointing to interesting articles you’ve found online, and build credibility and influence that way. Keep following what is happening within your field and make sure that you become known for twittering on a subject related to your site. By linking to different quality resources, people will look at you as an expert who knows where to find the best information and who shares knowledge with their followers.
The overall effect of you only posting quality and relevant tweets will be cumulative in the long run as branding is a subtle process that occurs over time. You will become branded as an expert who provides regular insight into your topic and this will expose you to other people who are interested in your subject.
Promote your articles
Don’t be passive, spread the word about your blog. No one will know about your blog if you do not get out there and tell people about it. So make sure to tweet about your articles. Try to grab the attention of whoever is reading by thinking of your tweets as your blog article headlines.
Experiment with repeating the same tweet twice a day with some 10-12 hours in between and analyze your results. People do not mind that you repeat tweets and your repeat will attract attention, as many new people have logged on since your original tweet some 10 hours before.
Remember that everyone can see your tweet history at any point of time by visiting your Twitter profile so make sure to delete the duplicate tweets to make your profile history look cleaner.
Make your content easy to retweet
Retweet is when someone takes your Twitter message and tweets that same message to all followers in their own Twitter network. Getting readers to retweet your content allows the power of your network to take over and spread your message in the Twittersphere.
It is free advertising and bloggers should do anything they can to encourage readers to retweet their content. TweetThis WordPress plugin lets your visitors send tweets about your blog posts. It places “Tweet this” link at the end of your articles so when the reader clicks on the button, the plugin sends the tweet about your article to all their followers on Twitter.
Make your site go viral on Twitter
1. Be active on Twitter and work on increasing your Twitter followers
2. Publish interesting articles on your site
3. Include “tweet this” link at the end of your articles
4. Tweet your articles, experiment with tweeting same article multiple times
5. Let your readers do the rest
If you haven’t already, this is the right time to join Twitter, as it is set to be the next big social network community in 2009. The earlier you join and start building your profile and credibility, the easier it will be to use the growth of Twitter to increase your site exposure in 2009.
Marko Saric blogs at How to Make My Blog. You can find comprensive list of his posts about blogging here.
36 Comments, Comment or Ping
Firas Steitiyeh
Well done Marco, excellent article my friend!
Mar 26th, 2009
Matt Cheuvront
Great advice. Twitter can be an extremely powerful tool for networking and driving traffic to your blog or website. Promote like crazy, but do it tastefully and tactfully. You don’t want to go overkill and drive away that follower-base you’ve worked on establishing!
Mar 26th, 2009
WPDONE
Great tips in this article. Maybe the advice to retweet same story and then delete one of them is not too ethical.
Mar 26th, 2009
Rajeev Edmonds
Very useful tips Marko. Twitter is certainly becoming a great viral marketing tool. The power of retweets is only felt when a chain reaction is started sending ripples across various networks.
Mar 26th, 2009
Santosh Puthran
Well done Marko. I have posted your article on SocialMedian and let my network know and how they can grow their networks.
I am fan of your blog.
Regards,
Santosh Puthran
Mar 26th, 2009
3kolone
Very useful guide to all Twitter beginners…
Mar 26th, 2009
McLaughlin
I did an RT from my acct (http://twitter.com/_McLaughlin) and I have over 10k followers. I wish I could find a way to see how many people come from my tweets. I can see the RT’s and I can see how many people visit my site, but I seldom tweet about my site. OTH I do post about a lot of other people and I only have one person that has ever given me feedback. A short story writer that has about 100 hits on his site every time I tweet about him, then I stumble him and that gives about another 400.
The mysteries of the web and web analytic’s!
Mar 26th, 2009
Daniel Richard
I see the “retweet” button on WTD too. It’s one of the best plugins to a blog this year, no doubt about that. :)
Mar 26th, 2009
Mark Dykeman
Overall I think this article is well written, but I have a major problem with the following:
“Remember that everyone can see your tweet history at any point of time by visiting your Twitter profile so make sure to delete the duplicate tweets to make your profile history look cleaner.”
You’re basically “burning the evidence” to cover up a practice that is slightly reminiscent of spamming the Twitter stream. I say slightly only because sending the same link twice in a 24 hour period is not an egregious offense by any means, but some people may find it offensive.
There have been times when I’ve Tweeted the same link up to three times in a 24 hour period (I don’t think I’ve ever exceeded that amount). However, I would never delete duplicate Tweets from my stream if I knowingly created them: if I did it or said it, it stays on the public record. Perhaps I’ll come to regret that stance at some point, but I think it’s the correct approach.
By deleting the duplicate Tweets, you’re engaging in behavior that makes it look like you are trying to hide something. The wording of the article suggest that, in fact, the author in this hypothetical scenario IS trying to hide something. That’s how I interpret the phrase “clean up”.
Mary and Leo, I’m a little surprised that this advice about deleting Tweets came through in one of your articles, guest post or not. Is this a practice that you wish to promote?
Mar 26th, 2009
Blog Expert
I love this article. Well done!
Mar 26th, 2009
Jonathan - Advanced Life Skills
That’s a good point about repeating the same tweet. I did this and tracked the results. It more than doubled the number of clicks.
Mar 26th, 2009
Trina L. Grant
I like the concise, review of your points at the end of the article. Nice way to wrap it up.
Mar 26th, 2009
Bamboo Forest - PunIntended
Your advice is solid.
Though I’d like to delve into this quote further:
“An easy way to get people to follow you is to start following them first.”
That is true – the more you follow the more followers you will get in return.
But, it’s also very self-serving and renders twitter to nothing more than a marketing tool.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just saying that if someone was using twitter and their objective was to stay in touch with people of their choosing – they would opt not to use the strategy you speak of. That being: follow as many as you can in order to get others to follow you back.
Hey… I may even down the road use this strategy, I aint going to lie.
That being said… such a practice really does transform twitter into a mechanism for exposure and not what it was probably originally intended for.
Mar 26th, 2009
Alana Taylor
You are so wrong. Tweeting the same tweet over and over will lose followers. Nobody wants to hear the same thing. And deleting tweets is worse. Totally taboo.
But I guess it doesn’t matter to you because your tweets are not personal. They are just “reading this” or “quote from this.” Just a feed of stuff you look at.
Granted, you have a lot of people subscribed but you obviously don’t care about any of them because you follow 10,000 people and there is no way that you actually pay attention to what they say.
You use twitter as an RSS feed. Why don’t you say the truth: “If you want to make your site viral, tweet about good content that isn’t yours. That way people will click on your link because they’re interested and you will reap the benefits even though you didn’t do any of it.”
Mar 26th, 2009
Cruz Andronico Fernandez
Good tips! Thanks, very helpful.
please check out my blog:
http://quasigeek.wordpress.com
Mar 26th, 2009
mayacou
Great advice on twitter use. I found it very helpful, although i admit having doubts about duplicating. Having said that I am sooo very new at all this and appreciate all the help I can get, thank you
Mar 26th, 2009
Miguel Wickert
As usual Marko, you continue to deliver killer post after post! :) Thanks for sharing. You’re right, we need to tell folks about our blog without being spammy. Share related, interesting content but don’t present yourself as a expert- there’s too many self proclaimed corn dogs in the blogosphere already.
-Mig
Mar 27th, 2009
Lainie Petersen
Excellent article as usual!
I have really found that using my newsreader has made a huge difference in how I tweet. I am constantly tweeting articles about tea, which is easy to do from Feedly’s interface. Set those keywords/phrases right in your feed reader and watch your influence grow!
Mar 27th, 2009
Julie M
Thanks for this article! This offers sound advice. Twitters have different perspectives on following back. Unless it is useless spam or ‘what i had for breakfast’ stuff, I follow my followers, because you never know where good advice comes from and I may be able to help in some way! It is about networking and it is important to give back and not just promote, promote, promote YOURSELF, but others, too! I promote my blog maybe every 30 tweets! Just my thoughts…. I am juliebmack on Twitter! Have a good day!!
Mar 27th, 2009
Judy
Is there a “Tweet This” for blogger blogs? Or only for WordPress? I’d love one for my blogger blogs.
Mar 27th, 2009
Marko Saric
Thanks for all the comments! I am glad the article was useful to many…
About ethical concerns: When I said “clean up” I actually meant it as “clean up”. It looks messy for a new visitors to your Twitter profile if they instead of getting 20 different tweets see some 8-10 tweets and the rest is duplicates.
That means you have 8 times 140-characters to impress and show your spectrum, instead of 20, which is not optimal from branding / marketing perspective. Nothing more in that. Think of it as your blog front page. It needs to impress for people to subscribe.
Sending duplicate tweets of your latest article is definitely the way to go. Twitter is worldwide now. If you send it once only you are only targeting people from similar time zones as you. My blog is for world-wide audience so tweeting 2-3 times makes sense and increases number of clicks dramatically. And people actually like it as they otherwise wouldn’t have seen the tweet, as they were offline or sleeping etc.
BAMBOO FOREST – I was asked to write an article on how Twitter can be used for marketing, so yeah this all was written from that perspective, and not from perspective of using Twitter to stay in touch with friends.
Mar 27th, 2009
mike
great post, How do you use “tweet this” on blogger
Mar 27th, 2009
Garret Belisle
Great tips, I was offline for about a week due to moving and lost alot of folks. Always update.
Garret
http://need-to-get-some.blogspot.com/
Mar 27th, 2009
Kikolani
That’s a good idea… delete duplicates in the history, but still do them so you can get Twitter users that are on at different hours the message. I’ve been trying to sneak my duplicates in other ways, like including my blog article link in when I thank someone for re-tweeting. :)
~ Kristi
Mar 27th, 2009
Harsh Agrawal
Great article Marco..Stumble the page :)
Mar 28th, 2009
skekoa
A formulaic, incomplete but accurate list of Tweeting do’s and don’t’s. But…
Will it work? To a degree.
Will it spawn viral popularity? It depends on how you define that marketing “buzz” word – viral.
Does it elucidate Twitter’s unique “social” advantage, the essence of what has made Twitter a true phenomenon. No.
Will it make you, your business and the message you’re attempting to convey, more useful or interesting. That depends more on you than Twitter.
Mar 30th, 2009
"E"
Hey great job Marco, over the past few months I’ve been gaining a lot of knowledge and insight on how to market and promote my site as well as working on becoming a twitter expert, this bit of information is definitely no exception, great job.
Peace n Blessings
“E”
http://www.rnbhiphoprockstar.com
http://www.twitter.com/therockstar76
Apr 4th, 2009
Sarah
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Sarah
http://www.craigslisttool.info
Apr 8th, 2009
Ben Cogan
Viral is effective because it’s considered a word to mouth form a friend or acquaintance reliable recommendation and not seams to be a sale made by the product/service owner.
That boost the effectivness of the campaign in 100’s percents more and get’s much more exposure.
May 6th, 2009
cbrown
Hey thanks bro for all the valuable tips:)
Aug 30th, 2009
sama
love this article, thank you very much for writing it! This topic is a very difficult one, sharing your information iwth an audience makes things easier!
Dec 27th, 2009
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