#1: Mine Twitter to Grow Your Audience
mark schaefer twitter pic
Mark Schaefer
While “if you build it they will come” is a great line from a movie, it’s a terrible marketing plan. To succeed on the Internet today, you have to create content that ignites and engages an audience. However, if you are a new blogger, you should probably spend more time developing an audience than creating your content.
Here are three easy but overlooked tactics you can use to build an audience on Twitter, which is arguably the best platform for this.
Once you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you’ll notice people will place you on public Twitter lists. Lists are generally categorized by a special interest or geographic location. For example, I might be on lists for “marketing experts,” “bloggers” or “business educators.” Find a relevant person to follow, and then dig into his or her lists. You’ll likely find a goldmine of interesting people to follow who will hopefully follow you back.
#2: Optimize Visual Content with Links
Donna Moritz
Donna Moritz
Visual content can act as a “gateway” to more valuable content. When planning visual content to post on social platforms, think in terms of how it can drive traffic back to your website, products and services.
For example, in this SlideShare deck Constant Contact included a link back to a resource page listing multiple blog posts with related content.
ck-donna-mortiz-constant-contact-slideshare-2
When fans click through, they arrive at a page of value-added blog posts relevant to the SlideShare topic.
Link a short video back to your website from your YouTube Account or from your Instagram profile link and make sure you provide expanded content around the video. For example, Final Cut King drives his fans on Instagram back to longer content on his YouTube channel by asking them to click the link in the description of his Instagram account.
#3: Analyze Past Content to Improve Posts
Neal Schaffer
Neal Schaffer
Most businesses analyze the effectiveness of their social media after they publish. Now, there are tools available to analyze data for content curation before you post.
Here’s how to use BuzzSumo to leverage the data of what has already been successful in terms of social sharing.
First, enter a keyword that is part of your social media content strategy. BuzzSumo will provide you with a list of the top-performing content in terms of social shares according to your keyword.
#4: Switch Up Content Formats
syed balki twitter pic
Syed Balkhi
Over the past two years, I’ve moved to adapt written content for multiple platforms, like YouTube, to increase my reach and visibility.
For example, by turning one of my List25 articles into video every week, I’ve grown the YouTube channel to 1.3 million subscribers and amassed over 200 million video views. A similar tactic with WPBeginner articles has grown subscribers to over 8,000, and the channel has increased sales for my WordPress plugins.
#5: Maximize Twitter Real Estate With Images
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki
“Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter (visualize them here on Internet Stats live), which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year.”
Creating the best possible tweet has never been more important. Adding visual appeal to your tweet is a very smart way to get your most important content noticed.
You can add up to four images per tweet or one fantastic image if you want. The choice is yours! To add multiple images, use regular Twitter. This isn’t available on any of the third-party sites. Here’s an example of a tweet with multiple images on Twitter.
Have you tried tweeting with four images? It’s pretty cool! #TwitterTips pic.twitter.com/NPhHpOPOth
— Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) October 22, 2014
Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist of Canva and author of 13 books including The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and The Art of the Start.
