Previously:
Where do I get my material from? (Part 1)
How often should I tweet? (Part 2)
How can I automate my tweets? (Part 3)
What about a blog? (Part 4)
How do I pull the whole thing together?
If you've followed along and read the complete series of posts so far, you should now be sending 30+ automated tweets every day to your Twitter feed. Now all you need to do is a little gardening!
With the increased flow of tweets you're going to get more replies from people. Be prepared to answer them! You're also going to have to carefully monitor the traffic that's flowing to your blog. This is the only way to understand which of your tweets are working and which are not. Hopefully you have analytics on your blog and you can see (hopefully hourly) just how many hits you are getting. Look for peaks and troughs. What time of day do you not get any visitors? When do you get peak traffic? Rearrange tweets to try and even things out a little.
Then try new things. Maybe a few video blogs on YouTube, or a series of special blog posts that you can link to again and again (like this one!). Over time, you can reinforce your brand by helping others to discover you and getting them to retweet your posts.
Oh, and that reminds me of one more thing - Use exciting headlines for your tweets. There's a lot more chance of people clicking on them that way. Words like 'FREE', 'advice', 'help', 'dummies', etc. will all drive traffic to you. Put yourself in the head of the reader. What headline would make them want to click your tweet? If I had called this series 'Building brands on Twitter' it wouldn't have had as much reader power as 'How to build a brand on Twitter for FREE!'
So, remember the steps:
How do I pull the whole thing together?
If you've followed along and read the complete series of posts so far, you should now be sending 30+ automated tweets every day to your Twitter feed. Now all you need to do is a little gardening!
With the increased flow of tweets you're going to get more replies from people. Be prepared to answer them! You're also going to have to carefully monitor the traffic that's flowing to your blog. This is the only way to understand which of your tweets are working and which are not. Hopefully you have analytics on your blog and you can see (hopefully hourly) just how many hits you are getting. Look for peaks and troughs. What time of day do you not get any visitors? When do you get peak traffic? Rearrange tweets to try and even things out a little.
Then try new things. Maybe a few video blogs on YouTube, or a series of special blog posts that you can link to again and again (like this one!). Over time, you can reinforce your brand by helping others to discover you and getting them to retweet your posts.
Oh, and that reminds me of one more thing - Use exciting headlines for your tweets. There's a lot more chance of people clicking on them that way. Words like 'FREE', 'advice', 'help', 'dummies', etc. will all drive traffic to you. Put yourself in the head of the reader. What headline would make them want to click your tweet? If I had called this series 'Building brands on Twitter' it wouldn't have had as much reader power as 'How to build a brand on Twitter for FREE!'
So, remember the steps:
- Decide what your brand is
- Find external sources that reinforce your brand
- Set up automated tweets based on your sources
- Keep a blog and feed the posts automatically to Twitter
- Select 'top' blog posts to auto-tweet
- Monitor and adapt as necessary
It's not an overnight process and there a lot more nuances I could write about. But if you follow everything I've written you'll be well on your way to building your own brand on Twitter for FREE! Good luck...
This was really helpful - great blog! Though why does the word "dummies" drive traffic? I'm always looking for the words that will make people respond.
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