If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Overview

Twitter offers you the possibility to post 140 characters long messages to your dashboard, communicating with all the people who follow you. In addition to this your dashboard will get updated with messages from the people you follow. If you run a blog and follow and are followed by the right people you can use this to your advantage.

Twitter as Excerpt

If you use your twitter account for purposes that are similar to the goals you have for your blog, you may utilize this and possibly drive traffic both to your blog and to your twitter account. Often you see people tweeting about new blog posts they have made on their blog, hoping that their follower will see the url in the tweeting noise during peak-time. Is there a better way to use twitter to drive traffic to your blog post? Yes, I believe there is. People in your network (followers and people you follow) are probably in some way interested in the things you plan to write about on your blog (if your blog match your profile on twitter). Instead of just posting the url to a new blog post, start pushing for your blog post by starting discussions and post insightful tweets on the subject. If you manage to do this, it is a win-win for you and your followers. They get a problem or subject presented to them, with a little discussion your hook is set. They will probably be eager to read your blog post. You have used Twitter as an excerpt, dragging people in to your blog post.

Blog Article

The actual post or article should be a deep dive into the subject you have been discussing on twitter. You should of course start up pointing back to the discussion or first message on twitter that started the idea on this blog post. The article should add value to the people who were involved in the discussion on Twitter as well as the readers who have not yet discussed the issue on twitter. Be open with your twitter identity and invite your blog users to connect to you in order to add to similar discussions in the future. The article should show that you have taken input from the people you discussed with on twitter and also add extra levels of analysis, that may if done well, generate more discussions in comments and on twitter.

Connect Blog and Twitter

When the blog post is published, you should of course introduce it to you fellow tweeters as a result of your discussion and ask them to read it. Hopefully you will get quality visits to your blog who probably start subscribing to your feed, and as the discussion is out in the open on twitter, your blog post may spread to your fellows network.

Summary

Utilizing Twitter and your Blog audience may open up for new readers on your blog and new followers on Twitter. Using Twitter as a tool for bootstrapping your blog article can be a very powerful tool in order to achieve that. How do you use your blog to drive twitter followers and your twitter account to drive blog readers?

Tweet This