Jan 22, 2013 / Beginner

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

In this week’s Community Pool, we noticed lots of you asking about how to grow traffic to your blogs. Participating in the Community Pool is a great first step, along with commenting on others’ blogs. Another way is letting your social networks know what you’re writing about, which WordPress.com lets you do easily with Publicize.

Elizabeth is going to be taking a wide-angle look at promoting your blog on social networks tomorrow, so today we thought we’d focus on one platform that seems to confound many people: Twitter. To tweet or not to tweet?

I often talk to bloggers who are reluctant to join the Twitterverse:

“I don’t have time to keep up with another thing.”

“I don’t care what people are having for lunch.”

“It seems like a giant waste of time.”

On one hand, these are legitimate complaints. It is yet another password to remember, there are lots of people talking about their lunches, and you can get sucked in and end up wondering where those three hours of your life went.

(Hint: you were probably following the #famousmoviesrenamedforcandy hashtag.)

(Like “Zero Dark Chocolate Thirty.”)

On the other, it can be a really effective and efficient way to make connections that you wouldn’t otherwise make. You can follow — and converse — with bigwigs in your field, along with lots of other folks dedicated to the same things you are. You’ll read posts and find links to information that will inform and inspire, and can stay on the pulse of your issues.

Here are some considerations for helping you decide whether to join the fray:

Twitter Bird

  • It’s a medium for conversation, not just broadcasting. Yes, you can and should let people know about new posts on your blog via Twitter. But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re not going to get very far. Twitter is a place to extend the conversation, not just ply people with “Hey, Read Me!” links. If you’re not tweeting original content and engaging with others (through dialogue or by re-tweeting them), don’t bother.
  • It takes time. It can be a worthwhile investment, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but it does require some. You’ll need to figure out who to follow, and then make sure to interact. This doesn’t mean you need to keep your Twitter feed open on your computer all day long, but it does mean you’ll want to check in periodically to see what’s going on. No one bothers following a person who posts once every two months.
  • It’s not the same as Facebook. Or Tumblr, or LinkedIn. Elizabeth will fill you in tomorrow on how these sites differ and how they’re most useful; suffice it to say that your Twitter content should be unique. If all you’re doing is auto-tweeting your Facebook status updates, you’re not really being an engaged twitizen.

The bottom line is that Twitter can be (1) a lot of fun, (2) a great place to connect with people in your areas of interest, and (3) a way to sow your blogular seeds among a larger audience. But if you’re not prepared to invest a little time, you might be better off letting it go.

Are you on Twitter? Has it been useful for growing your blog, in your career, or in another way entirely?

Show Comments

102 Comments

Comments are closed.

Close Comments

Comments

  1. It’s true that it takes some time to take care of your twitter account but I found it really usefull not only to promote my blog but also to learn about what other bloggers and writers are doing as well as keeping up to date with the news from the publishers, bookstores, libraries and universities.

    Like

  2. I have a twitter account @Bisan_smiley feel free to follow and I usually follow back. I’ve know many people who have the same interest whether bloggers or photographers, photography is one of my hobbies and learn much from other photographers… I’ll follow the post tomorrow to know how to be more effective through twitter.
    thank you for your all interesting posts 🙂

    Like

  3. I was a huge fan of twitter until my tweets were hijacked. It wasn’t my account, but someone very kindly kept quoting what I hadn’t said. The result was frightening. Now I only use the automatic WordPress tweet. I don’t join in any conversations. Once bitten, twice shy. Be warned.

    Like

  5. I’ve been on twitter a couple of years now @portugalpiglet
    Started to use Tweetdeck which enables me to set up different streams for tweets using cerain hashtags. For example #NaNoWriMo #Writing #Postaday2013 #Portugal #Photography #Travel etc

    Everyone who uses any of these # hash tags will appear in my twitter stream. IT’s a great way of connecting with people of similar interests.

    Don’t forget to use hashtags when tweeting 🙂 Problem is it can become addictive. 5mins a day is all I allow myself 🙂 Great way to connect with other bloggers

    Like

    1. 5 minutes! You deserve an award PiP! I used to be a total Twitter fiend with dual accounts, Tweetdeck, Twitpic, my Follow Friday and hashtag homies, you name it, I did it all plus thousands and thousands of endless tweets and conversations with Tweeps and it was fun… I use it sooooooooooooooooooo differently now. TY God! 🙂
      Elizabeth

      Like

      1. Hi Eliz, yep 5 minutes! I found it so easy to get sucked down the proverbial rabbit hole and lose and hour of my life. Now mainly use tweetdeck and select a few tweets to respond to or retweet. I create lists so I can follower people easeier as well. I could never see the point of Follow Friday 🙂 However, it’s amazing the people who don’t use hastags, which is a great shame

        PiP 🙂

        Like

      2. Follow Friday was a fun and cool way to connect instantly with a sizeable number of people. If you’re chatting with your friends no need for hashtags… Anyway, for anyone interested in learning more about using Twitter, I’d encourage they read these two articles and sign up for TwitterCounter; an awesome free service.
        10 tips to get ahead on Twitter in 2013
        5 Twitter tips & tricks to keep your followers engaged in 2013
        Nice chatting PiP!
        Elizabeth

        Like

  6. I’ve just started to link-dump on Twitter, Facebook, and G+. WordPress does the Twitter and Facebook bits for me automatically but for Google I have to find where I last dumped my links and then batch up any new blog posts. It’s not very elegant. As for the conversations on Twitter, there really aren’t any. Twitter, at least for me has morphed into less of a discussion and more of just a loose collection of strangers and their monologues. It’s on Facebook where the engagement is happening, I’m getting comments and likes on Facebook and next to nothing on Twitter. The only thing my WordPress blog gets are spam comments, so that’s extra-worthless. I miss the community of LIveJournal back in the early 2000’s, just don’t get that with WordPress and I don’t know why. My guess for the answer is that Facebook is just too pervasive and people are just too lazy. Might as well just comment on Facebook and be done with it. So the blogs just sit there, comment-free.

    Like

    1. I have the opposite. I post into my Facebook group and get a lot of people clicking but little comments on the FB page, and a lot more on my blog. As for Twitter, I don’t think of it primarily as a space for people to comment on what I’ve done, but I like to join in conversations using hashtags that interest me. I get followers this way and then when I post a blog post to Twitter I get hits from there too

      Like

  7. I really don’t enjoy twitter that much. It’s seems much too complicated and you have to spend too much time on it trying to follow threads. My posts go to twitter but I’m not sure if people really look at them. When I do go on twitter it’s because someone has invited me to a discussion or I go to look at #FridayReads every Friday which I love. Maybe I4ll go on more eventually if I have the time.

    Like

  9. Twitter has helped me gain followers. But lots of followers don’t automatically equate to lots of hits or readers… well, at least, not in my case. The most hits ever on my blog in a day was a little over 100. But my blog promoting skills could use some work, so yeah… it’s not as simple as just blaming or using Twitter.

    Like

  10. Though most of my tweets relate to walking – the subject of my blog – I write and follow about books, publishing, baseball, comedy, politics. My alter-ego feels freer on Twitter and I’ve met a lot of new people. I follow who’s entertaining or informative – not just selling their thing.
    I agree sometimes I don’t know what people are talking about – always in the middle of some thought wave, but I don’t worry about it.

    Like

  11. Personally I don’t tweet much and I haven’t that much people I follow. But I send out the information of a new blogpost out to my followers via twitter every time I post a new one.
    The reason to use twitter for me is twofold: First, there are many people here in Germany, who don’t like to follow a blog via daily email. That’s to much inflow for their inbox. To follow a blog via twitter, keeps you informed and your inbox clean. If the title of a new blogpost sounds interesting, you “click and see”. If you like, what you read, ist’s easy to share that post, you just have to retweet it to your friends. No email to write, no adresses to search, just one click on the retweetbutten and the information is out. Following a blog via RSS or another reader is not everybodys thing, especially for (older) people who are not so used to the net. But there are many people who find it easy to set up a twitterline and follow the blog via twitter. The second reason I use twitter is, that I often get information or ideas via the tweets of bloggers or friends, that I than share on my blog also, especially in my weekly post on mondays (“Interesting things in the blogosphere”).. It’s an easy and effective way to share information, without having all the stuff in your inbox. Most people I follow use twitter that way. There are nearly no one, who tweet about their meals or so. Most of them share information I value or inform about a new post on their blog. To get theese informations, I don’t have to change to another side or medium. I worked with twitter via echofon, a firefox addon thru wich you could follow the twitterline on the same page you were working on. Sadly. echofon has put down it’s service last year. I now follow my twitterline via thwirl, wich is not that good like echofon, but until now the best (new) way for me.
    In essence I would say, that 10 % of my readers come via twitter and up to 30 % of my informations/ideas I use I get via twitter.

    Like

  12. Nice to know that I’m not the only one who is confused about how to use Twitter effectively! I just started a Twitter account, haven’t tweeted a lot yet, so I’m looking forward to the next post.

    I’m finding it hard to change gears, from the blogging mindset of having a blank canvas to write and post whatever I want, to the Twitter requirement of staying within 140 characters!

    oh yeah… @peters154

    Like

  13. I have two twitter account. I post my blog to @musicnfilm. And i have my own personal twitter just to “litter”. Haha! Or just to kill the time while on traffic jam or in the middle of boring meeting. But twitter is not the only option to gain traffic to your blog. It doesn’t help much. But it works.

    Like

  15. I love Twitter. I used to think it was a bit useless, and had that “hasn’t been updated in three months” account. Then I began learning to actually interact with people, and now have gotten to a modest number of followers, engage in weekly Twitter chats, and am getting more readers from Twitter as well. (Still not many, but the number is getting higher). Even if I never got views from Twitter, I’d still enjoy it. There are so many people in your field and beyond to interact with and discuss topics/engage with. I highly recommend it. People who feel like they know you are probably more likely to support your endeavors, especially if they are good ones.

    Like

  17. I too am on Twitter an have loads of fun there! I use it both professionally as a doctor and personally. It is though, hard to explain at times especially to my colleagues! A couple of weekends ago I had so much fun with my Twitter friends over our morning cups of coffee that I wrote a post about it. “Of Babies and Donuts” was in part an attempt to explain the fun and power of Twitter.

    Like

  18. I’m a twitter fan, but it took awhile to grasp how much it can be a useful tool for searching content, reading what experts in your chosen field are saying, etc. For example, let’s say you want to follow content about #Leadership. (the # just acts as a searching tool). You can discover, within seconds,highly useful information that it would take so much longer to uncover on Google, for example. It’s like having a personalized research tool….I love it and encourage everyone to ‘just try it’ , and you don’t even have to tweet to gain the benefit of twitter.

    Like

  19. I am on Twitter, as Countingducks if anyone is interesting. Yes I am one of those people who is guilty of just saying they’ve published a new post. This happens automatically when I publish, and I don’t really know how that happens. This may sound laughable, but I’ve looked at my Twitter account, and I can’t see the place where you input fresh tweets. I will look again. As for Elizabeth, if it’s the Elizabeth I think it is. she is a remarkable, knowledgeable person on this subject, as well as being extraordinarily helpful. One last thing. I wish there was a spell check on the comment section as my spelling is rubbish. I might have proved that here.

    Like

    1. Hi Peter,
      They have another wonderful Elizabeth on board who will address the value of social media to blogging… Thanks for the kind words and yes, while I don’t write about it much these days, I am quite knowledgeable on the subject. TY! 🙂
      Elizabeth

      Like

  20. Thanks for the tips. Truly gave me a clearer perspective of tweeter. One I realized is that it is also about giving and sharing others. There are times that I am more thrilled to share the amazing work of my blogger friends than about me. And 2013 is a year of giving, even in social media.

    Like

  21. I was reluctant to join Twitter when I first started blogging, but now that I understand it, I have had a great time with it (my handle is @boozedancing). It’s all about connecting with whatever your niche happens to be and then interacting with a wide variety of people. Thankfully, all of my experiences to date have been very positive.

    One more thing…

    In case you’ve never done it, put a tweet out there with a random hashtag to see who follows you. It can be pretty funny!

    Cheers!
    G-LO

    Like

  22. Twitter is an important part of socialising, the best bit about it is interacting with people that you probably wont talk to again. The best thing for me was tweeting my judo video on youtube to Ashley McKenzie who went to the olympics and he watch some and replied! It was great!

    Like

  24. I always feel like Twitter is for smart phone users and since i don’t have one i’m too lazy to check and maintain a twitter account from the actual website.

    Like

  25. I recently started to “tweet” – not sure if it helped with increase my blog audience, but I am enjoying it, although I am not on it as often as I would like to be. But that will change once I get my tablet I am sure. I think it is a good tool because I have found other blogs and other interests, so eventually I may see an increase in traffic, but for now it is for fun.

    Like

  26. I want to know more about this. I look at Twitter and follow stuff I’m genuinely interested in and then ignore the rest. I never follow celebrities because all they do is @. I have looked at followers of people I’m following but haven’t found that many people whose tweets interested me yet, seems like trying to find needles in a haystack. Sometimes I feel compelled to blurt out a comment at politicians, but I don’t expect a response because their tweets are posted by auto-PR-minions.

    Like

  27. I am on twitter (@teamstophie) I use the Publicize + twitter option in the publish options on my posts so that it is automatically tweeted as soon as they are published. I dont do this to gain blog followers via twitter but mainly so that the few people on twitter whom i know want to read my posts can click the link and do so that way.

    For some people repeatedly tweeting their link may work but i have seen people doing this and it annoys me rather than interesting me. I dont have many followers on twitter so unless i started tweeting it ‘@’ people i dont think it would make much of a difference for me personally – and i would feel like I were harrassing people in the process. Perhaps if my blog were about something other than personal things…something that would benefit others then it would be a productive way to gain new audience but for me…well I dont even link it on facebook because I dont want to advertise it to everyone on there.

    I mainly use it to post my random thoughts, experiences or funny stuff (usually stuff my son says) and its good to see whats going on in the world but thats about it (for me)

    Like

  28. (@iamritukt) Twitter was a little confusing in the beginning but one month into it and I am loving it. It is a lot of fun, I have to stop myself from reading every single tweet from my mini group of followers and people I follow. I have gained some readership as well 🙂

    Like

  29. I am enjoying Twitter far more than I thought I would. I started off simply following the accounts of blogs I enjoyed on here and elsewhere, especially ones which have similar topics to mine. At first I had about 3 followers and only tweeted when I wrote a new post. Later on I started hitting “reply” to tweets that interested me (either because I agreed with them or the opposite) and using appropriate hashtags. I started to get followers who’d seen these tweets. I don’t get masses on clicks to my blog from Twitter, but I do get some every time I post. Finally, one of my posts was retweeted by 13 people and that day I got masses of new hits, followers, facebook “likes” etc.

    Like