This is a guest post by Luca Filigheddu from Twimbow.com.
Gaining Twitter followers is, in my experience, way easier than gaining RSS readers or, in general, regular and engaged readers. For this reason, making Twitter an important source of traffic for your blog is becoming more and more strategical for every blogger.
How to achieve that when you are starting from scratch? How to leverage Twitter in order to grow your audience?
Today, I would love to share with you three simple tips to make this happen as quick as possible.
1. Monitor Your Niche
First of all, you must try to figure out who your potential readers are. The best way to do this is to track all the tweets that contain blog posts from other blogs in your space.
On Twimbow you can easily do that with the “Monitor”. Create one monitor for each blog and simply track “www.[blogname].com”. This way, all the tweets containing the name of those blogs will appear. You can also configure each “monitor” to generate a visual notification and a sound (on Chrome only, but it’s worth it).
After that, it could be very interesting to insert all the users who are tweeting /retweeting those blog posts in a list or mark them with a colored label (eventually, follow them with the Twitter account of your blog or with your personal account). This way, you can easily identify them in your stream and engage them lately.
In the image below, I am tracking a few blogs about cars (for example). The green speaker icon in the central monitor means I will get a visual and audio notifications when new tweets are available (that is, someone tweeted an article from that blog).
2. Schedule Posts Of Your Articles To Twitter
In my experience, if you want to give your blog posts proper visibility on Twitter, you must post them on Twitter 2-3 times a day, at least 3 days / week. Of course, it is very important to find the right compromise, otherwise your followers could be annoyed by your multiple posts.
Moreover, if you target an international readership, you must make sure to properly cover the different time zones. Good times to post are 9am, 2pm and 2am (targeting another time-zone).
You can use Twimbow Slots to schedule your posts. You have a slot for each hour of the day, set to your timezone. Just calculate the right time zone and insert each post you want to promote at least two-three times during the day. You can also choose a few blog posts to test different times and see what is better for your blog.
You can short URLS with Bit.ly from within Twimbow or with any other service that lets you track the clicks. This step is very important, since measuring the conversion you get from this activity is crucial.
At this point, make sure to go back to (1) and track who is retweeting and sharing your stuff. It is essential for (3).
3. Engage, Engage, Engage
Last but not least, be active on Twitter. No, better, be VERY active on Twitter. You should engage all the people who are reading and sharing your posts (yes, all!), asking for feedback and, eventually, telling them about other related content from your blog that could be potentially interesting for them.
For example, if you blog about technology and wrote a post about the latest cool gadget, tell people (tweet people) who shared that post on Twitter that you (you did, right?) wrote another post and the previous version of that gadget or about the brand in another post.
Even better, add a comment to that tweet. It is very useful to make people aware you are expert in your field and this increases the probability they will follow you and bookmark your content. Nothing new here, people want to feel important, want to have the perception that behind that blog there is someone who cares of them and use Twitter actively to engage readers and be helpful. I firmly believe this is very important for a blog as well as for any customer care who actively work with social media.
Ok, are you ready to start making Twitter the #1 source of traffic for your blog? It is incredible how some bloggers still underestimate the power of Twitter despite it is a wonderful way to make people know about your blog and create and manage a faithful readership. What do you think? Please drop me a tweet, happy to discuss. I am @filos 😉
Bonus: for a complete analysis of the best time to tweet, check this post.
Twitter appears to be the one of the leading Social Media marketing choices for the Business to Business market due to Viral Marketing benefits.
Hi Luca, Your a very good blogger and helpful. All your ideas and post are packed with good information that are very useful. Thanks for sharing this, one thing about I can tell is by using twitter you must not spam so that you may able to get there trust and if you want more follower do work by heart not just all business.”business by heart”.
Thanks for the info. I have been using Tweetdeck up to now but will check out Twimbow.
Twimbow sounds really cool. Will it automatically follow and unfollow people for you too. Can it also automatically send DMs to those who follow you. I used to use TweetAdder to do all this for me, but it stopped working.
Tweetadder is a great tool but it’s not really a competitor to Twimbow. You can use them both.
Very good tips and I will definitely try them out! The truth is that I kind of ignored Twitter in the past and I’m not very good with it, but hopefully after reading this article, things will change 🙂
regularly tweeting can also help in getting good followers. I have seen an increase in my followers as soon as my tweet.
Awesome tips and all are effective too…
The most I like is 1 one i.e. Monitor your niche as its very much necessary that we are aware of all that moments that are happening at our blog and on this basis we can forecast or make our future plan.
Thanks a lot for this important and effective tips. Surely going to apply it ASAP.
Gaining Twitter followers is definitely a great way to build blog traffic and these seem like winning tips.
I’m a bit light on Twitter usage, afraid to say, but whenever I personally utilize it these are certainly the approaches I will take.
Thanks for sharing your insight!
Everybody knows that social media brings in millions of visitors to thousands of websites. From this view, it’s obvious that not a lot of websites are yet to maximize the possible traffic they could get from social media such as Twitter. I’m guessing not even a 10% of the blogs and websites out there are profiting from social traffic at all.
I’ve yet to get my twitter following up to standard so please do share your thoughts with us in another post on how to grow the following first. I think Proctor is already on to some great tips there. I would love to get more active on twitter and will be trying out Twimbow. thanks
you are welcome!