Last Updated on by Michael Brockbank
Twitter can be more than just a way to send short messages to friends and family updating them on your current status or various situations. With the right strategies, you can increase traffic to websites, blogs and other online content in order to promote yourself as a legitimate author or creator. How can this be accomplished inside the 140 characters that are allowed in Twitter?
Get an Account
Twitter is free to use and can be a great marketing tool. Since almost every person and business has a Twitter account, it only makes sense that you get one too. If you already have one, perhaps you could start another to be used as your primary method for professional distribution. Your personal account may be full of your own thoughts and posts that may not be viewed favorably by potential clients. Don’t worry about not having followers just yet. Using hashtags in your Tweets can still get your content noticed to slowly develop this list of followers.
Know Your Hashtags
In Twitter, hashtags are used to join your comment with any given topic. For instance, the hashtag “TBT” is generally used in order for anyone to talk about things related to “Throwback Thursday.” If you don’t know what that is, it’s when people discuss objects and things of days past in order to stir some nostalgia about childhood or other simpler times. Hashtag trends can be invaluable if your content can be linked to hot topics. The problem is, your material might not even be related – which can cause it to be ignored anyway.
When creating your post for Twitter, include the hashtag as part of the sentence instead of using it as an after thought. The example below shows how some tags can be used:
{source}<blockquote>There is nothing better than eating barbeque chicken on a summer’s day. #JulyFun #PicnicTime</blockquote>{/source}
However, you can reduce the number of characters used by simply changing the words around a bit. So, you could write:
{source}<blockquote>Barbeque chicken is great for #PicnicTime for a bit of #JulyFun.</blockquote>{/source}
The above example removed about one-forth of the characters.
Material Links
Since Twitter only has 140 characters available for posts, you need to be wise with what you post as the links you provide can be long. If you are using Twitter to promote your blog posts or other material, you may need to condense the link within the tweet. Using tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite will shrink these links down for you allowing you to post more characters. So, you would want a short sentence describing your material and the link in order to encourage others to click on it to visit the site.
If your sentence is developed well and you have an active enough hashtag, there could be a great deal of interest focused on your content. This doesn’t merely work for writers. You can link everything from material you wrote, to screenplays you’ve created, to music you’ve composed, to images you’ve uploaded to Flickr. Even if you don’t have a single person following your Twitter account, the use of hashtags can still generate a great deal of visits to your material. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there in order to become noticed.
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