Reaching Your Audience via Twitter
A while ago I wrote an article giving advice to writers and authors about marketing themselves online. As part of that article I mentioned in a couple of paragraphs about reaching out to you audience. In this post I am going to expand a little more on the topic and talk about tapping into the potential of the social web to promote yourself and the ideas and topics you espouse.
Twitter Your Mouth Off.
Recently, at least in the UK, Twitter has been getting a lot of coverage. It’s clear that the service has been growing massively in popularity over the last year best on extended mentions both on TV and various mainstream media web sites, as well as from the news coverage of takeover propositions by both Google and Facebook. That being said, how does the service benefit you? How can you use it and how can you reach out to your potential audience.
Your Profile & What It Says …
To start using Twitter you have to sign up for a username. This effectively gives you a profile page which is the repository for all your Tweets. As part of the profile page you will need to add an icon and some biographical info and a URL. Needless to say this is a good place to provide a single sentence idea of yourself and what you have to offer with a link to the place online that fleshes out the detail. Remember this will likely be the first port of call for customers, readers, or whomever when they come across your tweets and wish to investigate further, so you need to make a decent impression, both with the profile and your tweets.
How Will Twitterers Find You?
Other users will find you in a number of different ways. The first will be from you actually telling them, either on your own site or elsewhere. The next way will be through the people they follow and the chance that you happen to be followed by them, so 2 degrees of separation effectively. The next and most interesting way will be through search. Twitter itself has some great search methods, and others have built Grease Monkey scripts to append twitter search results to the top of their Google search results.
Keywords and Search
To take full advantage of being found by search I recommend both using keywords in your tweets as well as topic keywords by appending a # to any known keyword. By way of example, when talking about the recent G20 summit in London, you could have used both the words G20 as well as the keyword #G20. If you know anything about IRC and the early days of the internet, this might make some sense to you, as it is effectively like building a new chat room.
Use Your Niche
Tap into your niche, emphasize it and really make your utterances interesting, inciteful and useful. People will follow you if you have interesting things to say. They will continue to follow you if you don’t annoy them, and they may even connect with you on another level, and with luck you can then score a slam dunk and turn them into a fan so that they will lap up everything you have to throw at them, creative or otherwise.
Not-Just-Another-RSS-Feed
Don’t make the mistake of using your Twitter feed as just another RSS feed, especially when you run a blog that pumps out content on an hour-by-hour basis. Twitterers and others hate being deluged in an unstoppable fashion and will just as quickly disconnect from you as they had started following you. Keep RSS for RSS and keep tweets for Twitter. Conversely you should consider putting tweets onto your blog using widgets to make the process simple. Be warned though that when importing feeds from twitter, the tweets may include any sundry comment made by your or a third-party and they are not always of the best kind.
Your Life in Real-Time
Unlike My Life in tweets, as recently published by James Bridle and seen on Laughing Squid, or on Amazon, you shouldn’t fall into the trap of telling each and every one of your followers every last detail of your life. They don’t need to know you just got out of the shower, ate an egg or even are contemplating the consumption of espresso and biscotti, unless of course your topic of choice is food and you are promoting yourself in that manner. Don’t get me wrong, it is great to see people like Stephen Fry on Twitter, but to have to follow him and deal with his incessant verbal diarrhea is way to much and definitely a case of enough being TOO MUCH.
Keeping Your Life Private
Personally I prefer to keep my online space public and my private space private. I don’t overly publicize my private life and I try to avoid giving people unnecessary access. Going online with social services like Twitter, doesn’t mean by proxy that you are giving your private life a public face. You definitely can, and most certainly should keep them separate.
It’s a Wrap!
Hopefully this post will have given you food for thought and get your juices flowing at the possibilities. As with anything, you make your own luck, and it is hard work. Your list of followers won’t grow massively overnight, but if you provide interesting fodder and utility, you can expect to pick up followers faster than you would otherwise, then you just have the fun of trying to keep them.
