How to use Twitter to Effectively Market Your Blog

Posted on Jul 18, 2012 in Guest Posts, Marketing, Social Media |

Guest Post by Sam Mauzy.

Today, just about everybody you talk to has a blog. The best bloggers will keep their site updated by posting regularly, from several times a week to even several times a day. Bloggers use several different tactics to get people to find their little corner of the Internet. SEO keywords and tags are a common way to make sure that web surfers find a blog post. However, so many bloggers put up the posts, add the keywords and leave it at that. They’re missing a huge part of marketing tactics for their blog, particularly Twitter.

twitter-plane-brown-iconTwitter is a fantastic way to get your blog’s name and recent posts out and about. However, every single Tweet will only capture some people’s attention, and only for a split second. The key ingredient to marketing successfully is repetition. This is the only way to ensure that your message will stick and that a large number of people will hear it.

Unless you’re glued to your cell phone even when you sleep, you can’t exactly update your Twitter every few hours of every single day. However, you do want to be bringing readers to your blog around-the-clock. The best way to deal with this is to sign up for a program that you can use to schedule your Tweets. TweetDeck and HootSuite are two programs that people can use to schedule Tweets for any hour of the day, up to several weeks in advance. You want to be reaching your Twitter audience as new people are signing on and as others are signing off. Schedule posts for every few hours during the day for several days in advance.

Make sure to rotate the times of your Tweets, too. For example, you may want to schedule links to your newest blog post for the next three days, but don’t schedule each one for 4 p.m. every day. Your fans who are browsing the Internet as they’re waiting for their work day to end will see your same post three days in a row. Next time you have something on Twitter, they’re going to ignore it because they’ll figure they’ve seen it before. If you post on even hours one day, post on odd hours the next. Also, HootSuite lets you choose five-minute intervals, allowing for even more flexibility.

Don’t overlook the importance of promoting older blog posts. As you gain new followers, they may want to read what you had to say this time last year. Obviously, this tactic will only work if you have several blog posts to choose from. Even if you’re a new blogger, however, you can start recycling old posts once you get on a regular, frequent blogging schedule.

Avoid posting the same exact thing over and over. Choose different excerpts from your blog to catch the interest of varying audiences. Repeating the exact same message multiple times is boring and akin to traditional marketing and sales methods, which people really don’t respond to anymore. Think about what your audience will find interesting and then present that information in multiple ways, even if you’re always linking back to the same blog post.

One thing that even the most frequent Twitter users forget to do is to add pictures to their posts. Pictures are worth even more than a thousand words when it comes to social media marketing. Photos get just about everybody’s attention and are one of the main things to keep in mind when composing Tweets or scheduling future posts.

Last, but not least, use hashtags wisely. Don’t overload your Tweets with them and always use hashtags that actually have to do with your Tweet. Otherwise, Twitter could prevent you from posting altogether.

Sam is a blogger who specializes in website conversion rate optimization and other online sales conversion services.