Blogging makes it possible for your brand to captivate its consumers on a deeper level while still showcasing the personality of your business. But if you aren’t utilizing social media to spread the word about your blog, you may not be seeing the traction you want purely from RSS feeds. That’s where the power of social media comes in, specifically Twitter. Here are 5 ways to promote your blog using Twitter, the most information-hungry social media site.
1. Keep it Optimized
Did you know that the first five words of any tweet are the most crucial in captivating your followers? Give your audience a taste for what your blog post is all about by simply tweeting the headline. That means your blog titles must be strong and optimized in their own right for best SEO. Use keywords that are most often used in your industry to get your information noticed. Of course, you want your titles to be equally unique and creative, but avoid being too obscure; you do not want to leave your followers with any room for confusion, because as rapidly as social media changes, so does the attention span of your following.
Below we optimize our tweet for best social SEO, utilizing our blog’s headline. The verbiage is strong; we use industry-friendly and highly searched for terms such as, ‘social’ ‘authority’ and ‘industry’ making the chances of our tweet to be discovered higher, as well as giving users a complete summary of what the blog post is about.
You can also categorize important tweets. Users can clearly see that we’ve uploaded a new post to our blog because of the information in brackets.
2. Highlight the Author
Brands oftentimes have a guest blogger or an employee who writes the blog content. For our blog, we have an array of contributors from each department who construct blog posts each week on their specific expertise. A strategy that we utilize it to always @ mention the author when promoting any new post, not only to give the blog a human touch, but it also means that your information will be seen by the author’s followers as well.
In this post we shared with our Twitter community, our Director of Digital PR, Amanda Goodhue (@angoodhue) was the author of the Top 10 PR Don’ts. We included her Twitter handle in the tweet in order to increase traction about our blog post. Amanda has over 3,000 followers making our reach that much stronger!
3. Host A Tweet Chat
A tweet chat is a live discussion about a particular topic hosted on Twitter by a user or brand. Prompt a conversation about your latest post using this tweet chat strategy. Depending on what type of blog you write, this could be a forum to introduce new ideas, educate the public, or simply fuel a positive conversation about your brand. Whatever your intention, hosting a chat on Twitter requires minimal time, resources, and can reap huge benefits. Don’t forget to promote the tweet chat via Facebook and on your blog!
This tactic also give users something to do with your blog material after they’ve read it. Most people aren’t too inclined to leave an actual comment, but they will want to tweet about something that interested them, especially a chat with the author themselves. Find a time and get ready to host your very first tweet chat!
We host a weekly tweet chat each Friday at 1PM PST, where we discuss the previous day’s post. This gives users enough time to read through the material and ask any questions they may have. If you aren’t seeing an automatic response to your tweet chat, don’t get discouraged. Prompt users you often connect with to start a conversation. Ask questions that followers will already know, and start to build awareness about your tweet chat. Eventually it will catch on with consistency and time.