Self promotion is rife amongst Twitter users. Some are doing it great, other’s.. mmm.. not so much. Self marketing is a tricky art, something even I don’t fully understand. There is definitely an unspoken balance which much be struck between conservative self promotion and ramming your goods and services down people’s throats.
Casually promoting your own blog posts by Twitter can be a great way of spreading your message.
Before I go any further, I can’t stress enough how important it is feedback-wise that you collect analytical data. Tracking your visitors is uber important. Because Google Analytics isn’t always the best mechanism for picking up visitors from shortened links, I find it useful to use a service like Bit.ly. I’ve talked about Bit.ly in the past in my web-based Twitter tools roundup.
Schedule Your Tweets
The biggest problem with Twitter is the fact that your communication is sometimes limited to those who are awake when you are.
A scheduling service like TweetLater can be used to schedule tweets about your blog posts to overseas tweeple (is that a word now or what?).
Being in Australia adds another layer of complication for myself. I sometimes find that the majority of my audience is actually in the US and UK. Because of the obvious time difference, I rely on services like this to help me reach the majority of my followers.
Direct Messaging New Followers
This method is probably the most over-abused self promotion method on Twitter. But, with that being said, it can be used effectively and show good results.
The best method for initiating an automatic DM is to make it not look like an automatic DM. While this has one side effect of soliciting reply DMs on occasion, you’ll find that an increase in click through rate is the main side effect.
Keep it conversational and light, and offer some incentive for them to click on whatever it is you’re giving them. Maybe you could link directly to a blog post instead of just your main page. If you do this, make sure you keep the link relevant so the message doesn’t seem stale.
Direct Messaging Thought Leaders
So you’ve written that seminal blog post. Possible your best yet! So don’t you think it deserves the recognition? When you post your own content asking for a RT depending on who catches onto it, you may find yourself with only a couple of retweets giving you average clickthroughs. Getting your content infront of the eyes of popular people in your industry can be the boost you need.
In addition to this, Direct Messaging on Twitter compared to email seems to be a slightly more effective mechanism for getting hold of those “untouchable” people. With Twitter being the flavour of the month, every man and his dog is paying attention, celebrities and thought leaders included.
Actively Seek To Answer Questions
If you’re always providing good quality answers you can afford to link to some of your own content when you are helping someone out.
Let look at an example. Say you are in the property investing industry. What I would consider doing would be picking a few questions from beginners (use Twitter’s search, you don’t have to be following them yet) and point them to some of your resources best suited for their problems.
This is a great way to touch base with the people around you on Twitter and your answer will be viewed by many of your own following. This builds trust not only with the person whose question you are answering, but social proof that you know the answers and are willing to provide.
Furthermore, this traffic will convert extremely well. Watch your blog feed subscribers soar!
Hopefully this has helped you out a little with your twitter/blog marketing. I’m by no means an expert, and I could do well to follow some of my own advice. Marketing yourself, your blog, and your business is something that doesn’t end.
How you go about it can be the biggest of challenges. Don’t seem too needy, yet don’t be afraid to push for “the sale”. Selling yourself (your blog, your business, your services), is truely something that takes time and is not achieved overnight. If some new marketing technique sounds too good to be true, chances are it is.
Engaging your customer directly in dialog can be one of the most effective means of selling out there. Twitter can help you there.
Further to the Direct Messaging New Followers – I’ve now begun to experiment with this in an effort to solicit more personal responses.
My idea is that people won’t response as much if you’re plugging yourself, but by asking some genuine questions about them could help create a genuine connection. Most people’s intentions with setting up automatic DMs is good (or i’d like to believe so), but the approach could probably be improved. Most auto DMs get a bad wrap because they are only masquerading as personal and come off as a cheap way to promote yourself.
My experiment is to use a different tact and make it completely about the follower and finding out about them instead.
Stay tuned to find out how this goes, I’ll probably dedicate another post to it.