Are you struggling to find your way around Twitter? Wondering how to get your blog some Twitter traction? Here are the top tips:

A little bit of planning goes a long way: It may sound a little tedious, but it helps to define your objective for using Twitter. There are many ways to use Twitter for marketing your blog, but you need to be clear on your main goal – e.g., to get more visitors, to network with like-minded individuals, to be perceived as an expert in a particular field, etc.

How you use Twitter depends on what you aim to achieve with it. If your objectives are multiple and varied, you can even use multiple Twitter accounts to share relevant messages.

 

To be memorable, become a brand: While you may already have a Twitter ID on your name, you may want to create another Twitter account with a name similar to that of your blog.

Why? Because it’s a great branding exercise – a similar Twitter handle will help your regular readers identify with your blog and follow you to stay updated with your latest posts. Make your blog a brand and give the brand a push using Twitter.

Tweet often: Don’t just stop at getting yourself a Twitter handle – you need to ensure that you post tweets on a regular basis. Sharing information often is among the most basic things you need to do to build your number of followers. Otherwise, people are going to lose interest and unfollow you.

Retweet and re-follow: It’s a great practice to follow your followers – especially in the initial phase of your Twitter activity. Over time, maybe you can restrict yourself to following users who you would like to connect with. Your followers will also appreciate it if you occasionally retweet (RT) what they share – it shows you are willing to even listen to what they have to say, rather than just serve your selfish interests.

Participate in discussions: An effective way to engage your followers is to have discussions on your Twitter account. When you post something and someone posts a response to your tweet, you can continue the conversation by replying to the user’s comments. You would most certainly receive comments for your blog via Tweets when you share your latest blog posts.

Engaging in conversations shows that you care about your followers, and you never know, you just might receive a great idea for future posts through such discussions.

Tweet your latest posts, and more: At the most basic level, you can use Twitter to share links to your latest blog post to get more visitors to read what you have written. But don’t just restrict your Twitter activity to sharing links to your blog posts – share unrelated thoughts and anything else that you found interesting enough on the net.

Post in the form of questions: Instead of using tweets to just convey your thoughts, you can also tweet in a question format to encourage more of your followers to take notice of your posts. A question makes them think and makes them more curious to know what you have in store for them – hence, they would be more likely to click on the link to your blog post in search of an answer.

Find your niche on Twitter: There are many interesting people and brands on Twitter. Find the ones that resonate the most with your blog and make it a point to follow them. Who knows, the people you find interesting might come across your tweets and find them interesting enough to follow you back too.

Use hashtags wisely: Just the way you have tags and categories on your blog, you can organize your tweets using similar hashtags as well. For instance, you can have the same hashtags as the categories on your blog, so that every time you have a new blog post under a certain category, you can share it under that particular hashtag.Keep your hashtags relevant enough and get more people to retweet and discuss your posts.

Be interesting: Of course, all the above points listed are on the technical side. However, to really succeed at marketing your blog through Twitter, you have got to be interesting. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how well you use your keywords or how often you tweet. Unless you have something worthwhile to say, your followers are just not going to be interested in what you share.

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