WotW: Boosting Your Blog’s Reach Through Social Media, Pt 2

Last week I explained how to use Facebook to increase your blog’s reach. This week, I want to focus on another social media platform, one that has potential to be your greatest ally, if you use it correctly. I’m talking about Twitter.

Twitter is huge. It’s popular. And yet, it can be very overwhelming. I know I was overwhelmed by it at first. After all, it has its own language of sorts (all the @ and # signs every other word). Everything has to fit into essentially one sentence, and a seemingly cryptic one at that. And yet, Twitter keeps on growing. And there’s a reason for that.

We’ve all heard the saying, “Content is King.” And it’s true. Twitter is where the content comes to life and the word gets out.

The first thing to know about Twitter, is it’s not Facebook. Such an obvious statement, but if you don’t understand this, you’ll never be successful on Twitter. Facebook works like this: you post once a day to your friends, or fan base. As people read through their feed, they’ll likely come across your post. If they like it, they may interact be liking, commenting or sharing. This is so regular, you can almost count on your posts being seen and read by people.

Twitter is a different world. On Twitter, if you post once a day, and expect your followers to see it, chances are pretty slim they will unless they are Twitter junkies. That’s because unlike the one post a day on Facebook, people are tweeting multiple times a day. The big tweeters are sending out content multiple times an hour. Your Twitter feed quickly becomes overwhelmed by all the content.

So what do you do? Just not bother with posting? No. The key is to know how to maximize Twitter.

TIPS TO MAXIMIZE TWITTER

• Customize your Twitter page. You can customize your background, header image, profile image and header text. There’s not an insanely high probability people will visit your Twitter page after they follow you, but you want it to be easy for people to identify your Twitter page as being associated with your blog.
• Practice reading Twitter. This sounds funny, but it does take practice. Twitter is all about seeing an insane amount of content, sifting through it to find what really interests you and then read more. Think of Twitter like reading only the headlines in a newspaper. If you only read headlines, you could scan through a newspaper in a matter of minutes. When you were done, you would have some semblance of an idea of what’s going on in the world, and hopefully at least a couple headlines would interest you enough to read more. Twitter works the same way. Each Tweet is kind of like a headline. Those that don’t interest you, you skip over. Those that do, often have a link you can click on to read more. In fact, I’ve found Twitter more useful than any news network when major events happen. During the manhunt for the Boston bombing suspect, I followed Twitter while I watched the news coverage, and I found more accurate information, faster on Twitter. Of course, I also found a lot of garbage. Twitter is the very essence of the Internet: everyone throws their ideas out there and you sift through it and find the best parts.
• Use tools to help you synthesize Twitter content. Reading a straight feed from Twitter can be overwhelming for the beginner, but there are other apps out there that can help you make better sense of it. My favorite is Flipboard, a free magazine-style app for iOS and Android. You can slurp your Twitter feed into the app and Flipboard will convert all those short, confusing tweets into readable headlines, often with the first couple paragraphs of the story. This makes reading through your content easier and faster.
• Follow people. Lots of people. Your Twitter feed will be most fun when you’re following interesting people, and there are plenty of them out there. Who should you follow? Well, Twitter makes that easy for you. They suggest lots of interesting people to follow. That’s a good start. But in terms of maximizing your blog, you should also follow fellow bloggers, competitors, industry leaders (if you are a recipe blogger, you probably want to follow big chefs and popular recipe sites), and other content leaders.
• One of the things you will notice about Twitter is the most successful tweeters focus on one or two topics. That’s all they tweet about. It’s not necessarily because they have a one-track mind. It’s because the more they talk about a topic, the more they come to be known as an authority. And that’s exactly what you want to be with your blog: the authority on the things you blog about. So watch how the pros do it. Study their tweets. Take notes. Get ideas.
• Use Twitter’s sharing functions. One of the ways Twitter is different from Facebook is in how you interact with tweets. The main currency on Facebook is likes. On Twitter, it’s the retweet. You can retweet any tweet. This is done by hovering your mouse over the tweet (in the browser) and pressing the retweet link. On a mobile device, you usually have to either click on the tweet or swipe, and select retweet. A straight retweet will simply send the original tweet to your followers. Retweeting someone is a compliment. It says you liked what they posted enough to share it with your audience, and hopefully the word gets spread. Get in the habit of retweeting content. Don’t retweet everything, but retweet things you find interesting and think your followers could benefit from.
• Favorite, well, your favorite tweets. A favorite is somewhat similar to a like on Facebook, but with an exclamation point. This is something you really like, so much so that Twitter keeps track of all your favorited Tweets so you can revisit them later. This is a great way to remember good ideas and potential ideas later.
• Reply to tweets. Oftentimes, people will tweet out questions, or tweet something that just begs for a response. Give them one. Let them know what you think. You can reply using the reply button. This is a great way to get involved with other Twitter users who may not know or follow you, but as you reply (not in an obnoxious or creepy way), you can start to build a relationship and maybe get them interested in following you too.