How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Platform
You have a blog or website. You have a Twitter account. You want to drive traffic to your website with Twitter. How do you make it happen?
Well, it is not as easy as just posting links to your site on your Twitter feed and hope people will notice.
The first step is to actually gain followers on Twitter. While non-followers will notice what you post, that happens as you gain more followers because it will be followers of your followers who will notice you.
How do you gain followers? Here are some simple but important steps.
- There are lots of bots on Twitter. Make sure you don’t look like a bot. Have a profile and background picture.
- Think carefully about your bio. Include information that tells people whether or not they might want to follow you.
- Start following people. You might idolize Twitter celebrities that have 5.7 M followers but only follow 3 people but unless you are already a celebrity, that is not going to work.
- Find people who are interested in the same topics as you, especially as related to your website, and follow them.
- Find the big names in the same field as what you are trying to promote and follow their followers.
- Interact with what other people are saying. Get involved in Twitter discussions, but think carefully about the tone you are going to use.
- You are going to want people to like and share your posts, so start by liking and sharing other people’s posts.
You might be thinking, “I don’t want to do all that. I don’t want to promote other people, I want to drive traffic to my site!” Well, there are no short cuts. You have to do all of the hard work on the front end to get the payoff on the back end.
So what kind of things should you share on your Twitter feed?
While you can just post your own links and you will get some clicks, it is not the most effective. Here are some things to keep in mind.
- Consider sharing a mix of your own content and of related content by other people. This helps to demonstrate you are a valuable source of information and not just a self-promoter.
- Don’t just share links, share thoughts related to the things you are interested. Share interesting quotes. Create some images related to your interest and share them.
- Use hashtags to your advantage. Don’t use 12 hashtags, keep it to three or under. Make them as specific as possible, so not just #life or #thoughts. Looy at what the trending topics on Twitter are at the moment and try to tie into them with your hashtags.
Finally, be consistent. Try to share something at least once a day. Build your Twitter feed to the point that people see you are worth checking out. If they find your Twitter account interesting, they will keep visiting and will likely share with others.
For those Twitter veterans out there, what would you add?
