If I read a blog and can’t find a Twitter link or hear of a business not on Twitter I automatically dismiss them. They obviously haven’t done their homework, don’t understand the yet untapped potential of 140 characters and couldn’t possibly have a blog worth following. In this day and age, in this internet world where everyone is scrambling to reach people, Twitter is the number one way to gain blog fame. Or is it?
Pick the networks on which you want to focus
There are so many tools now available to us that we can’t possibly devote time to them all. To really gain momentum bloggers should pick a few sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Technorati, whatever) to spend time on and immerse themselves in that community. With that in mind, maybe it’s not necessary for one of those networks to be Twitter.
I’m a Twitter fanatic. I love the people, the short bursts of information, the (usual) sense of community where people mutually share interesting tidbits within that community. But it’s time consuming. And when your followers follow lots of people, well, your tweets get lost in the abyss. About a third of my blog traffic is generated through Twitter, so I wouldn’t give that up for anything. But Twitter is also the one place where I devote most of my time. I occasionally post links of Facebook, spend about an hour a day on Brazen Careerist and recently joined 20 Something Bloggers. The other hours of my day are spent reaching out to people one-on-one via email and commenting on other people’s blogs. But what if I spent another hour on LinkedIn? Or really took advantage of StumbleUpon? Would I generate the same traffic? Or would I fail miserably without Twitter?
Twitter isn’t for everyone
Twitter is absolutely positively NOT for everyone. My mom is one of those people who can’t stand to even look at her Facebook News Feed because she doesn’t give a crap what’s going on with other people. When I tell her to “just ignore it” she would rather delete the whole thing altogether (is that even an option? I don’t know). Meaning the Twitter homepage makes her want to tear her hair out.
Can anyone leverage Twitter?
And I can’t tell you how useful Twitter is when not regarding a blog. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote in his book, Crush It!, that when he tweeted a free shipping code for his website he received significantly more orders than buying a billboard or taking out radio ads. So Twitter rocks in the free department. But how do I leverage that for my own blog? I’m not selling a product. I just recently tweeted that the first five schools to contact me would receive a free 2-hour workshop in social media as a job hunting tool. We’ll see if that works.
What do you think? Do you feel like you’re wasting your time or how has Twitter helped you?
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