Blogging 101: How to Utilise Twitter

Post, Post and Post

So many people are posting on Twitter at every hour of every day. In order to keep yourself in people’s feeds you need to post multiple times per day. You can post talkative tweets, polls, images of your day. Just keep your twitter active and engaging for people to follow.

Link to your blog posts

I personally use WordPress’s in built feature to tweet my blog posts when live, but you could also use Bloglovin’ or other similar websites and plugins. So my blog post tweet will go out as soon as it’s published, even if I’m still at work because I’ve scheduled the post. This means that people will know about it as soon as it’s posted, and will be there to get views and engagement.

You should also tweet about your blog posts multiple times on it’s first day live, then a few more times over the next week or so. This is to keep it’s momentum going, but also helps to reach those followers who maybe didn’t see it in the first tweet.

You can also link back to your older blog posts, as long as they’re still relevant. I still get so many views on my Newcastle Uni post because there’s a new set of students every year who are interested and most of my traffic is through Twitter.

Use Imagery

If your tweet has an image, there’s a strong chance eyes will be drawn to it more than just text. So where relevant (e.g. for blog posts) tweet with images as it can increase your views and engagement. Whether it’s a photo or a title image like above, it makes the tweet stand out.

You can also enable Twitter Cards. This will mean when a post’s URL is tweeted, the tweet will automatically optimise to show the summary, an image, a video or however you’ve set it up to optimise tweets for your site. You can turn the settings on using Yoast SEO if you are using WordPress, if you’re not check out this site to learn how to do it manually.

Link Relevant Accounts

If you’re writing a post and you mention someone else, tag them in your tweet! When I write good reviews for books I’m always tagging the author in my tweets when promoting. This means the author can see the good review, and may possibly share it out. The same goes for brands on twitter, they will often reply or retweet if you try to engage with them.

Of course context is key in this situation. Don’t tag people in post’s that may talk negatively about them or their product/service. That author probably doesn’t want to read your negative review of their book anyway, and they definitely don’t want their day interrupted because you’ve shoved it under their nose. So make use of the tag feature – but only when it’s relevant!

Interact with people

Twitter is such an engaging social media site. Compared to Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest I get so many more people interacting with me and my content. So take the time to interact with people as well. You can make so many good relationships with other bloggers using twitter and you can often create a support system and network from this.

Twitter Chats

There’s so many good twitter chats every week. These give you a great opportunity to meet new bloggers and people with similar interests, aspirations and ideals. They also discuss certain topics which can help you understand something better or improve your blog.

Blog Groups

Getting involved with similar people to you is important. I’m currently in a couple of different groups where we have random chats but we also share our content and give each other advice. These are the first people I go to when I need help with something blogging related, and it’s great that I’ve been able to make friends through this.

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are a way for you to pull out the tweets of certain people and you can see this on a separate feed. For example, I’m on a book blogger list which covers all the people in my blog group that I can just take a gander through when I want to see bookish content. This makes it easier if you want to see certain content and if you use others peoples lists it helps you to find new people to interact with.

Don’t Spam

Yes I know I said to post a lot but don’t tweet 10 things in 5 minutes. People aren’t going to be interested if their entire newsfeed is you and they may unfollow you if they feel that you’re spamming them.

Don’t follow and unfollow. People know this happens and they will see you doing this which will make them not want to interact with you. (Or they’ll interact negatively towards you which is even worse!)

Also, you don’t need to comment on every single tweet someone posts. It might be nice to support them sometimes, but unless you’re really close friends it can get weird if you’re spam liking and replying to everything they post. Also, people will know if you’re not interacting honestly and being genuine and will steer clear from you.