Twitter is great for promoting a blog post just after you've written it. If you have a decent following and use appropriate hashtags you can usually get a few clicks on it -- often many more.

Share quality timeless content

For this reason, it's often worth tweeting old blog posts as well. Of course you shouldn't do this merely for the sake of it. You should choose only good, timeless content to promote. If there are some old posts that don't quite make the grade in this regard, why not rewrite them? It will be good for the overall quality of your blog apart from anything else.



Tweet them sparingly

Needles to say, you wouldn't want to overdo this by tweeting the same posts time and time again. It could become annoying to your followers and you might end up losing some of them. That said, it's worth tweeting the really good ones at least a few times over several months to get the greatest benefit.

As is so often the case with Twitter, timing is relevant here. If you tweet the old post at different times of the day, different followers will be logged in and see it in their streams. If you have a lot of followers this could add up to a good number of new visitors after a while.

And as long as you keep growing your following, a few months down the track you'll have many more of them who are sure to have not seen these posts. So you can do the whole thing again.

Manual or automatic?

I know that you can have software to do this all for you. But frankly I think it's better if you just tweet your old blog posts manually. You can vary the wording of the tweets -- as well as the hashtags -- to get the best results. And if you are doing it by hand, it's very unlikely you'll do it enough to reach a point of overkill.

This is certainly a worthwhile tactic if you have accumulated a lot of content over the years that is now buried deep in your archives, and therefore tends to get little or no search engine traffic.

I have been tweeting quite a bit lately, and I've noticed a noticeable increase in the rate at which I'm accumulating new followers. And these aren't just people I've followed originally, who are now returning the favour. They've been finding me rather than the other way around.





Tweet often

That's to be expected, of course. If you tweet often, you're leaving lots of keywords out there to be found. Also, the more you tweet, the more often the followers you do already have will see you. Therefore it's more likely you'll get a retweet or mention. If the people who do this have a lot of followers, then many of them will see your profile as a result, and some of them will decide to follow you.

Tweet well

Needless to say, you shouldn't just get obsessed with the quantity. You've got to tweet things that are interesting and useful. As well as getting more followers, you've got to maintain a good reputation as someone who is worth following because you're a consistently good source of information.

Several years ago, when I started blogging, I met a guy who had a very good description for a blog. He said it was like a "public notepad". That phrase has always remained with me because I thought it was a great way to look at it. You would just throw your thoughts down online even though you may well develop them later on to produce columns or articles for newspapers or magazines. You could even collate all your posts, rewrite and edit them into a book.

Blogging a medium in its own right

But even if you didn't end up doing either of those things your writing would still be read by others. Right from the start, blogging allowed you to get your message out to many.

Much has changed since then. Traditional print media's popularity and reach has waned considerably. And much of that has to do with the fact that countless people now read blogs instead of papers and magazines. Blogging is (and has long been) a publishing medium in its own right.

And just as blogs functioned as public notepads for columnists in the early days, social networks (Twitter in particular) can be used as public notepads for blogs! (Twitter is a microblogging site, after all.)

Collate the tweets you've shared

So, IMO, you should use your Twitter feed as an effective blog post generator if you're not already doing so. The way to speed up the process is to use the platform to record tips, tactics, insights and observations whenever they come to you -- much as you would have jotted them down on a notepad in "the old days".

Always include relevant hashtags (eg #Twittertips). Doing this makes your tweets more findable by other tweeps and will surely draw in more followers. But it also makes it easier to look back through them for recurring themes when you decide to write a blog post.

Say you've tweeted often using #Twittertips. After a week or two you could easily have twenty or more great little insights already succinctly written. You can just cut and paste them into your blog, do some editing and your post is pretty well complete!

You've almost certainly tweeted some good articles by other bloggers using the same hashtag as well. You could include those links in your post and alert their creators on Twitter. Some retweets will likely ensure, and you may even get a link back from one or more of these blogs. (Of course these won't be gold for SEO, since they'd be reciprocal, not one way. Still, they would certainly help to increase your blog traffic.)

People who just use Twitter to link to articles written by others can be a bit annoying after a while. However, there's no harm in linking to such content as long as you don't overdo it and continue to interact with your followers by way of retweets, mentions and replies. You should also make sure that you are only sharing what your followers are likely to find interesting and useful.


Apart from the fact that you yourself will learn a whole lot of new stuff hunting for and reading such articles, you'll start to get known as someone who shares high quality information and more people will follow you to get hold of it.

There's another benefit. If you share the blog post of a well known blogger, then your tweet will often automatically include his Twitter handle. He'll see that as a mention when he next logs into the site. And will probably look at your Twitter profile. He might follow you, and retweet some of your tweets. Better still, he might even link to your blog from his.

If you've written a new blog post, then you should tweet it as soon as possible. Not only does this often help to get it indexed by Google a bit quicker, you can sometimes get a nice little burst of traffic as your followers, and others who have found the tweet, click on the link.



Announce the post in the tweet

It's a good idea to announce the tweet with something like "new blog post". Stats have shown that this phrase helps increase the number of clicks the link gets.

The body of the tweet will be the title of your blog post. So, you should already have something clear and compelling here. But there's no reason why you shouldn't rewrite it to make it punchier and pithier for Twitter.

Use good hashtags

Make sure you include appropriate hash tags at the end of the tweet, although you don't want to use too many. Apart form anything else you want to leave enough free space so that the tweet can be retweeted by others in full. That's why having no more than three is a good idea.

It's always worth putting some thought into which hashtags you're going to use. Remember that some of the more general ones are hugely popular (eg, #blogging). So, they may lift your tweet's visibility quite a bit as people search the platform using them, but this effect will only apply briefly as they get buried by all the others.

That's why using more specific hashtags (eg, #bloggingtips, #bloggingstrategy) can be a good option. You'll still get benefits, but for longer.

Include images

Images make blog posts themselves more interesting. And the same thing applies on Twitter. A tweet that has a photo, picture or infographic is more noticeable in the stream and ultimately more tweeps will click on the link included than if it is words alone.

Often Twitter will automatically import an image from the post. But if not you'll have to upload it yourself when composing the tweet. If that's the case make sure the file size is small. This makes the process quicker and easier. I usually reduce mine to around 100kb or less.