Twitter-brand yourself to increase exposure and traffic

This is the third part in the series of Twitter related articles. First I looked at why you have to start promoting your blog on Twitter, then I explained the strategy behind getting a large number of followers, and in this article I will look at how to brand yourself as an expert in your field and how to maximize the impact of your tweets.

Branding yourself on Twitter

Keep following what is happening within your blog field and ensure you become known for twittering on a subject related to your blog. By linking to different quality resources, people will look at you as an expert who knows where to find the best information and who shares knowledge with their followers.

Your Twitter profile and reputation is just as important as some clicks. If you have trustworthy profile you will gain more followers as your profile will look very valuable and knowledgeable.

The overall effect of you only posting quality and relevant tweets will be cumulative in the long run as branding is a subtle process that occurs over time. You will become branded as an expert who provides regular insight into your blog topic and this will expose you to other people who are interested in your subject.

Code of conduct for your tweets

1. Be helpful, useful and friendly. The more you give, the more you will receive in return.
2. Do not promote your blog and your blog articles all the time. You might have got somebody to follow you, but if you do not provide value to them, they can just as easily unfollow you.
3. Try to grab the attention of whoever is reading by thinking of your tweets as your blog article headlines.
4. Make sure to make each tweet interesting and worth reading to your target audience. Post the best you can come up with and hopefully your followers will decide to click on and check out your profile and your blog.
5. Restrain yourself from tweeting too much as many tweets might make your followers unfollow you. Some three tweets a day on average works fine for me. Use TweetStats to learn more and analyze your tweets. If you cannot stay away and must tweet all the time, use Qwitter to get updates when someone stops following you. You might see trends and learn what to stop writing about.

How to optimize the exposure of your tweets

1. Use TweetBurner to shorten the URL’s you want to include in your tweets. As tweets are based on 140 characters, this will save you some space for your message.
2. TweetBurner will also track how many clicks your tweets get. You can analyze which tweet structures attract your followers the most, what headlines work best, and at what time of the day your tweets get most clicks.
3. Use analysis from TweetBurner with service of TweetLater to schedule your tweets to be posted at the best possible times to optimize the exposure and number of clicks.
4. Experiment with repeating the same tweet twice a day with some 10-12 hours in between and analyze your results. From my experience people do not notice that you repeat tweets and your repeat will attract attention as many new people have logged on since your original tweet some 10 hours before.
5. You can automate your tweets even more by using TwitterFeed to have your new blog RSS news feed entries automatically posted to your Twitter followers.

Twitter Marketing E-Book

For much more information on Twitter, check out my “Twitter Marketing E-book: How to go viral on Twitter“. The e-book includes all the tips on how I use Twitter to build my authority, drive traffic to my blog and get customers. Enjoy twittering!

Image by: Mike Baird