How to increase your blog traffic with Twitter

To increase traffic to your blog, people beyond your family and friends have to be aware that you’re blogging and when you post. Social media is a great way to promote your blog and find more people who want to connect with you and your content online. Twitter is a huge platform for people looking for great information, so fill your blog with awesome content and try these 5 methods for increasing your blog traffic with Twitter:

1. Create a Twitter account for your blog.

It’s important to have consistency with your branding across all platforms. Use your company or blog name in the Twitter handle to make it easily recognizable as your brand. Put the blog URL in your Twitter bio with some website information, along with a profile picture, description, and theme that will represent your company.

If you want your blog to be tied to an existing Twitter handle for a person or company, be sure to add the blog URL to the bio for that Twitter handle. That way, when people look at the bio, they can click the link to check out your blog.

2. Engage, engage engage.

There is an unwritten law of reciprocity that drives people to give back to those who have given to them. Imagine purchasing something from a store and receiving a free gift before you leave, a gift not based on the amount of money you spent or one that requires you to make a purchase before redeeming, but just a gift to say, “Thanks for supporting us.” Wouldn’t you think favorably of that company and want to shop there again?

That same idea applies to social media. If you don’t engage with others, retweet their tweets, comment on their blog posts, or follow them, they will not feel inclined to do any of those things for you just because you put the content out there. The more generous you are online, the more likely you’ll be to get Twitter followers who will retweet your tweets or check out your blog.

In addition, if your blog post favorably mentions other bloggers, companies, or customers, include an @Mention in your tweet about your blog post. Mentioning other on Twitter with the @ before their Twitter handle will help them get publicity and will make them more likely to retweet your link to their followers. This technique can also help establish an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship that you can use to promote future posts on Twitter.

[Flickr image]

3. Be creative and concise.

Just tweeting the title of your blog post with the link won’t necessarily get people to visit the page. Unless the title is something completely intriguing, forgo including it in the tweet. Instead, try one of these creative methods:

Write an introduction for your link that is interesting in some way; it may be surprising, mysterious, relatable, or humorous, but write something that makes people want to click to get the full story.
Include a statistic or infographic. Statistics are a quick way to convey a lot of information, which makes statistics share-friendly. Twitter users will also get curious to how you use or relate to that statistic and click to see your post.
Choose a short quote from your blog post, and use it as a teaser for the blog’s content. If you try this technique, don’t choose any old quote: Make it a quote that others will find really interesting or relatable. Quotes tend to be very popular on Twitter, so connecting your post to a tweet with a good quote can also increase your likelihood of getting retweets, which will only get your blog more exposure.

4. Ask for an “RT” or a “retweet.”

It may seem aggressive or too bold to ask followers to retweet your post, and it probably would be if you did this all the time. However, when using this technique occasionally, people are more likely to retweet your post if you ask them to. It’s easy to read over your post, even click on your link, and just move on to the next tweet, but asking followers to retweet is a call to action that has statistically been more successful than tweets that don’t encourage their followers to retweet. According to socialbakers.com, tweets that ask for an RT get about 73 retweets per tweet on average, but tweets that don’t ask for any retweets only get about 2 retweets per tweet on average.

[Flickr image by Petit_louis]

5. Use hashtags.

Hashtags are a way for Twitter users who don’t follow you to see your posts. When a particular hashtag is searched, tweets from users all across Twitter will show up if they have that hashtag. Add hashtags that are relevant to the topic of your post, and try to include at least one popular or trending hashtag.

For important posts or promotions, you can also create a unique hashtag to promote on Twitter. This method will create a Twitter platform for followers and Twitter users to discuss your blog or company. Creating your own hashtags can be a good option to use for a company or blog name to promote over time or for special promotions or events that will generate a lot of buzz online.

Information sources:

[featured image on Flickr by Gohsuke Takama]

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