How to Stand Out on Twitter in 3 Easy Steps

This past weekend I did an experiment: I left my cell phone locked in a drawer and decided to completely disconnect from the virtual world. I took the opportunity to see my grandmother, go out to dinner with friends, do some laundry… I basically enjoyed a 100% analog life. Fast forward to next Monday, back to the office, I take a look at Twitter and whaaaaat? I had a few hundred missed tweets ? What the heck, man?

Any Twitter user (whether you are a regular or sporadic user) know how fast this social network moves. According to Hubspot, there are more than 9,000 new tweets every second, with an average lifetime of about 18 minutes each. My goodness! That’s frenetic! Considering the amount of content (or noise, if you will) that is generated per minute on Twitter, it’s easy to see that the chances of your tweets having some impact are very small.

“Yup, you’re absolutely right. I don’t want to waste my time sharing content on Twitter and seeing it fall into oblivion… so let’s stop using Twitter!”

Wait! Twitter can be and actually is a very good platform to drive traffic to your website. However, to achieve this you must know its ins and outs and be smart about it. In this post you’ll learn the 3 secrets to make your blog stand out on Twitter and attract more traffic. Are you up for it?

Before Twitter, Do Your Homework

We’ve been talking about the concept of Inbound Marketing and the importance of making your blog grow. As you may already know, Inbound Marketing is a term coined by the founders of Hubspot that refers to the idea that, instead of trying to reach your audience through classic advertising, you should generate content of interest to attract them. I mean, they’re the ones looking for you and not the other way around.

Social networks in general and Twitter in particular play a very important role in Inbound Marketing strategies. The followers you have in social networks are your followers because what you offer them is of interest to them, which is precisely what Inbound Marketing stands for—give them what they want, and they’ll keep reaching you.

To get a good number of followers and to get them interested and attracted to each new post on your blog, you need to create quality content. In the blog we have discussed this topic in depth on numerous occasions, so if you don’t know where to start yet, here are a few examples:

1. 5 Critical Components to Successful Content Creation
2. The Solution to the 5 Most Common Problems of WordPress
3. How To Write High-Quality Content Your Audience Will Love
4. 7 Skills that Will Help You to Create High Quality Content
5. Strategies to Become a Productive Blogger

Increase Your Visibility in 3 Easy Steps

Assuming you’ve already done your homework and have an interesting blog, how can you increase its visibility? Well, following our advice, of course ?

#1 Publication Frequency ⏲

The first secret to ensuring that your message is not lost in the whirlpool of Twitter is to publish with a high frequency. As we have just mentioned, the lifetime of a tweet is 18 minutes and thousands of tweets are published per second—it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, your tweet will probably go unnoticed. However, if you tweet often and with some frequency, you increase the chances that your followers will see some of your tweets at some point.

A few months ago, Antonio spoke to us about the optimal frequency of publication on the different social networks. Although there’s no clear consensus on the exact number of tweets you should publish daily,  everyone seems to agree that you should do it more than once. Here’s what Antonio told us about it:

From our point of view and our own experience, you should publish a maximum of 15 times a day from one single Twitter profile, spreading the messages. And, of course, sharing content of different topics.

Then there’s also a discussion about the best time to share those tweets. Should you tweet in the morning? Throughout the whole day? What works the best? Well, I’m afraid that, once again, there’s no clear consensus here either—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

In our particular case, Ruth tried to answer these same questions in her analysis of the best time to publish on the different social networks and came to the following conclusion: given that we have clients from around the world (each with their own time zone), what works best for us is a more or less constant drip of publications throughout the day… ?

Nelio Content

I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.

Panozk

WordPress.org

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#2 Authenticity and Novelty ?

Once we accept that we must publish several times during the same day a second problem appears: what should we write on each tweet? Because, let’s face it, if it was already hard to write a couple of blog posts a week, how do you expect me to write 15 or more tweets a day now? ?

What you should basically do is share your content using slightly different promotional messages that can catch your followers’ attention. Usually, the easiest option here is to share its title, as it’s one of the key pieces of your post, right? I assume you spent some time thinking of a good and catchy title, so it should drive big traffic…

How to Stand Out on Twitter in 3 Easy Steps {permalink}

but that only helps you once or twice—you won’t be sharing the same tweet over and over again. So what now? Well, either you rephrase the title or embed it in a call to action, or you share relevant fragments of your post, trying to engage with your followers. Something like this:

In this post you’ll learn the 3 secrets to make your blog stand out on Twitter and attract more traffic. Are you up for it? {permalink}

The best way to create these different tweets quickly and efficiently is to use the content we already have. For example, did you notice that the second tweet I showed you is a phrase that appears in the introduction? By extracting fragments with interesting facts or catchy phrases from your post, it’s very easy to create unique and interesting tweets.

#3 Teamwork ???

The last piece of advice I am going to give you today is perhaps the most important of all—you’re not alone. One of the great things about social networks is people. Social media offers you a huge network of mend and women that can help you spread your message. The moment you realize this and do something to leverage it, your marketing campaigns will take a qualitative leap.

One of the most common tips when creating quality content is to link to external sources. Such links are good for several reasons. On the one hand, they allow your readers to have more information on a topic that we know interests them, and you’ll save them some time (which, in the end, will benefit you too). On the other hand, linking to other authors allows you to identify people who are probably experts in the topics you cover, so you can reach them and build your own “expert network”.

One of the easiest ways to contact these experts and weave your own network is to mention them on Twitter. For example, if you now write a post about Twitter and link this article of mine, why don’t you write a tweet about what you’ve written and explicitly mention me in it? It’s clear that the topic you’re writing about is going to interest me (after all, we’re talking about similar things) and a tweet with a mention can easily arouse my interest. If I see you linked me in your post, I’ll be happy because you’ll be helping me attract more traffic from my website. So I might think: hey, let’s retweet this guy! See where I’m going? It’s all about relationships ?

WordPress Plugins

There are numerous WordPress plugins that make it easy to share your blog content on Twitter. Some of them, for example, highlight parts of our content that our readers will then share (if we’re lucky), such as Better Click To Tweet. Others are responsible for publishing a tweet when a new entry appears on our blog, such as the well-known Jetpack. And others allow you to automatically reshare old content to extend the life of your posts and spoil the long tail SEO, like Revive Old Post.

Now, if you want a plugin that allows you to tweet your website frequently, extract fragments automatically from your posts to share them and mention the authors you link to on them, you can find it on this website. It’s called Nelio Content and it’s a great tool. It’s a plugin we created some time ago with the aim of automating and simplifying the creation and sharing of content. If you want to have a look, download it from WordPress.org and give it a try ?

Featured Image by freestocks.org on Unsplash.