Why Self-Promotion on Twitter Won’t Cut It
Our host today is Matthew Weber. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out our guest posting invitation here.
I have been blogging for quite a while now. However, Twitter, for me, is a fairly new way of promoting my content. Twitter has become an important factor in spreading the word about my blog posts. However just tweeting about my re-tweet did me no good, since I had no audience.
They say if you build it, they will come.
Content is what draws people to your blog, but I have found that content is just as important when it comes to self-promotion on any social network. When people come to my blog, they come to see what I have written, or because they have need of a certain topic. When people follow me on Twitter, they do it because they enjoy or have need of the topics I tweet about.
What I found is that my content was not enough. I tweet about technology, sure. However, since I am just one dude, I can only cover and have an opinion on a certain amount of topics within the tech industry, and even with three other authors on my site, the amount of different topics we cover just can’t make a dent in the overwhelming amount of news coming out of the industry.
Therefore, just tweeting about my content did not increase my audience at all. What was a poor tweeter to do if no one was actually reading my content?
I decided to sit down and figure out why. The scope of the content I was able to push out to my few followers was not as broad as it needed to be. Since it was just my content, the breadth of information being put out in my Twitter stream was not very wide.
What did I promote on Twitter?
While still keeping my topic narrowed down to the technological theme, I started to consistently re-tweet other’s content to go along with my own. This widened the scope of content within my stream, and has doubled the amount of followers I had a week ago. Now even giving in to the fact that some of those are probably spammers, I have finally been able to create a stream of content that more and more people are interested in.
Now, this might not be the case for you. If your topic is already broad enough, you might be able to garner enough of an audience that will spread the word about your content. My problem was that there was not enough content in my stream to generate interest. By increasing the quantity and quality of information I was promoting, I have been able to generate that interest as I could never do before.
Ron Leyba said:
Matthew , I really love this post of yours. Short but very precise information. It was really a good tip on how, we, bloggers can improve the number of our followers and at the same time, improve the quality of our tweets.
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Matthew said:
Thanks! I think it important to always keep an open mind on how best to promote my content. I urge others to do the same.
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Devesh said:
Great post. You’ve made a good point. Really awesome information.
Thanks for the awesome tip Mathew.
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Matthew said:
Thanks!
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Hieu Martin@Blog Tips said:
Great post. thanks for sharing idea to promote blog with twitter
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Richard Lord said:
Matthew,
This is a great reminder that content on Twitter is just as important as content for any other blog publishing. I’ll certainly be focusing my attention on my Twitter content!
Thanks
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Internets Worst Garbage said:
Hey Matt, I agree that you can’t just tweet your content because in order to get masses of people to come in you need to retweet others! (Just like I will retweet yours and repost your article on my blog
) I think that it’s a lot better to be able to share the world your own content and content you find interesting. Great blog will follow you on twitter. Follow me back!
Matthew said:
Thanks For the Comment!!
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Kathy said:
I am no Twitter expert by any means. But, it is quite obvious that you would need to build a following before getting any results with your self promotion anyways.
I think for people with new Twitter accounts, it definitely helps to start out just by retweeting other people’s content that is of good value. Those people will appreciate your efforts in voting for their material. You will get followers that way and ultimately be able to start promoting your own material.
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Onibalusi Bamidele said:
Really great post Matthew,
Self-promoting yourself only won’t work. The best way to get great results from twitter is by sharing great content from many other people.
Thanks a lot for the great post,
-Onibalusi
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Mandeep said:
I also feel that other than the spammers, some people just want you to tweet about your life, so they get to know more about you.
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Matthew said:
I agree. I think that a mix of your content, personal stuff, and others content, might be the exact thing needed to grow a huge audience. Thanks for the comment!
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Harriet said:
Self promotion on Twitter really annoys me, I use twitter a lot for just keeping up with friends really and getting people tweet me with promotions that aren’t bloody real!
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Matthew said:
Spam is a problem. I don’t think Twitter’s built in spam reporting mechanism really works all that well. They need something different.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller said:
Matthew –
It is not only a question that your content “was not as broad as it needed to be.”
The most effective participation on Twitter is to share both your own content and the content of others. If you only share your own content you appear too “salesy.”
No matter how broad someone’s content is, if he or she is also NOT sharing the content of others on Twitter, he or she is unlikely to be perceived as a “good citizen” of the Twitter community.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller
http://twitter.com/ZimblerMiller
Matthew said:
Excellent point. I didn’t even think of this as a community thing. I was, for maybe obvious reasons, being more selfish. I wanted people to visit my site, which is why I came to the conclusion of tweeting others content.
There is the other way to look at it, as you point out, as it is just the right thing to do. Excellent point.
Thanks for the comment !!
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller said:
Matthew –
Although I love Twitter as a social media platform, I do realize that there are so many things to consider (besides one’s own time) when tweeting.
I am concerned, reading deemarief’s comment below, about the best etiquette for what she is talking about.
I like to tweet: @username Thx 4 RT [and then my tweet that has been retweeted]
But is this considered impolite by what deemarief has said? I hope not.
What I really dislike is when someones tweets: @username Great post.
And I see this tweet in my Twitter steam and I’m left wondering: What was the post and where’s the link to that post?
deemarief said:
I agree with Phyliss. Also, saying thank you and reciprocating RT’s and FF’s are important parts of being a valued citizen of the Twitter community.
Recently I RT’d someone’s tweet about their most recent blog post. Almost immediately that person RT’d my RT twice, but never once said thank you to me for mentioning them to my followers.
That’s poor form, in my opinion. It wasn’t like time got away from him and there were too many people to thank. He was just too intent on tooting his own horn.
Ah well, the twitter stream marches on.
Good article Matthew. Thanks
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DeeMarief said:
Hi Phyliss,
The format you mentioned: “@username Thx 4 RT [and then my tweet that has been retweeted]” is one I use all the time, too. I think it’s pretty common actually.
The thing I was pointing out is when people RT the “good stuff” about themselves, but don’t bother to say thank you.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that. I remember tweeting about your blog once thru dagaloo.com and you did a quick RT with a TY and it made me feel good about our exchange. That’s all I’m saying.
Do you think I’m expecting too much?
Phyllis Zimbler Miller said:
No, I don’t think you’re expecting too much. But then I believe in good manners.
But today I discovered a problem on Twitter — where I have been remiss.
I use an add-on RT function instead of Twitter’s RT function (which I find confusing because of whose picture shows with the tweet).
Throughout the day I check my @ZimblerMiller folder on my Twitter account to see if there’s anyone who has RTed me — so I can thank them.
But today, when working with a client, I realized that Twitter now has a Retweets folder on a person’s home page.
And when I looked in my such folder I discovered people who had retweeted me through Twitter’s RT function and thus didn’t show up in my @ZimblerMiller folder.
I tried to figure out how to thank these people easily, but at the moment I’m stymied.
DeeMarief said:
Phyliss,
I’m thinking just one tweet thanking them all would be okay. Sometimes it’s just not feasible to thank everyone individually.
I didn’t know about the retweet folder you mentioned. I’ll have to check it out.
I’m not fond of the way twitter set up their retweets to show the RT’ers pic with someone elses tweet either. I wonder what their reasoning was.
It sounds like you’re getting RT’d a lot though & that’s great!
Phyllis Zimbler Miller said:
I like the idea of just tweeting the usernames and thanking them all at once.
And here’s another problem I’m having. (This is for you, Nick.) I find I’m confused on dagaloo.com — I understood it better when I first joined.
This evening I wanted to participate and gave up because I couldn’t quickly find what I wanted.
Nick, do you have a primer?
Nicholas Cardot said:
The truth is, I need to make a lot of changes to the site. It seems confusing to a lot of people. It seems to be filling up with predominantly sales, marketing and landing pages and there needs to be a way to control it so that only good content gets promoted. I think the bottom line is that I need to sit down, really assess what features would really make it easy to use and then overhaul it into a Dagaloo 2.0 state. So get with me and let me know what would make that system more powerful for you Phyillis. I would love to hear your feedback either on here or feel free to hit the contact page here at SS101 and shoot me an email. I definitely want to make it more useful for everyone.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller said:
Nick –
When you first started Dagaloo it was very clear what you offered — a way to find good content on a specific topic to tweet.
I thought this could be a particularly good tool for clients of my social media marketing company who don’t blog and need to share valuable content on Twitter and don’t have time to go searching themselves for this content.
But then when I tried again to quickly find social media posts that might interest me and that I might want to tweet, I got totally lost trying to find that content.
I’m not saying not to add bells and whistles. What I am saying is please have a “quick search” function so that people can easily find posts on a specific topic.
Does this comment make sense to you?
Nicholas Cardot said:
I actually like that feature primarily because the app that I use (Tweetdeck) gives me the option to send out a traditional retweet or a direct retweet like what you’ve just mentioned.
I was talking with Jordan Cooper (http://www.notaproblog.com) a while back and this was back when I thanked everyone and he proposed this concept. When you thank absolutely everyone does it reduce the value of the thank you. After all, I’m only getting the same exact response that everyone else got so what makes mine any more meaningful.
In fact, I wrote a comedy post a while back that jokingly proposed the idea of a WordPress plugin that would auto-thank via a tweet anyone who tweets links to your stuff and people liked the idea. Isn’t the idea of thanks to be personal? Wouldn’t auto-thanking completely defeat the purpose of it? I know that’s not what you’re proposing here but I think it relates to the discussion so I thought I should bring it up.
Matthew said:
I haven’t really weighed in on this yet. I think a proper thank you for a re-tweet is a follow back. If a person re-tweets something of yours it makes sense that that person like some of the same content you like. This seems win win to me. They get more followers, you get more access to great content, and you send the message that if people re-tweet, they will get followed by someone influential.
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Dennis Edell | Direct Sales Marketing said:
I have the opposite issue, also a problem in some ways.
As I sit now, before tweeting this post lol, I have 1148 tweets.
Only a handful, maybe two are actually ME, either my posts or me chatting, all the rest are re-tweeting others.
I’ve been warned, this too does not lead to a healthy twitter life.
Whatcha think?
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Charlie Seymour Jr said:
Thanks for this Great Post Matthew!
It’s important for each of us to narrow our focus: niche, as we say.
If you are all things to all people, you mean nothing to everyone. So find your specific market and go after them on your website, Twitter, Facebook, everywhere.
Charlie Seymour Jr
http://PersonalSuccessMarketing.com
Sandy said:
Thank you for posting. I really find it very helpful as I’m helping real estate agents start their Social Media from the ground up. Your posts are very very helpful.
Thanks again!
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Rudy Vasquez said:
I have seen the same effect in my twitter account a month ago when I started to tweet and re-tweet on a more general-widened topic.
Ashley said:
Thanks for the Tips, Twitter is new to me and hopefully I can learn so more about it!
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Reza Winandar said:
Do not use your personal Twitter account for promoting your brand, create one for it.
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Brian Kinkade said:
That’s a great strategy you got, glad it worked well for you. And thank you for sharing it with us. I can see how it could’ve worked, that way you have expanded your connections by retweeting other people’s content while staying in your niche.
Good job with this sweet article.