Are you struggling to understand how to use Twitter for getting traffic to your blog?
Some say that Twitter is dead.
BUT… if it were, how would that explain other bloggers who are having massive success with Twitter. They get thousands of followers, tons of engagement and lots of traffic to their blog content.
Maybe you don’t know where to start. Especially since Twitter is a social media platform that only allows 280 characters in a post (up from the previously limit of 140 characters!)
Standing out in a fast-moving news feed can be a challenge.
The good news?
You can learn a few actionable tactics to start getting more traffic from Twitter today!
Why Twitter is the Best Brand Platform
Twitter is a massive social media platform. Whether you are sharing content or advertising product and services, Twitter can give you a huge boost.
You don’t even need thousands of people following you. Like anything else, it’s better to have a small loyal following of the right people instead of thousands who could care less about your brand.
According to Statista, in ten short years, Twitter now has 330 million active monthly users. That is crazy but true!
Think of all the awareness you can create for your brand!
That’s not all.
Twitter is one of the only social networks where you can do automated traffic and lead generation without paid ads. In fact, it’s highly automated with the right tools.
That means more exposure and less time that you have to spend.
Twitter Traffic: Here’s How to Get More to Your Blog
Twitter is not so complicated once you understand these steps. It’s not about just posting stuff to get traffic. There are some foundation steps that you have to do help.
1 – Create a Powerful Twitter Profile
Your profile is the first thing people will see when they visit your Twitter page. How do you want to be perceived by them?
Have you seen Twitter profiles with a photo of a pet or a logo? Sure you have.
Is that someone you want to follow or trust?
Your Twitter profile picture should be a smiling picture of you. Forget pets, logos or pretty scenery. People buy from those they like and trust.
You start building that like and trust factor with Your profile.
That leads to the next part of your profile: your Twitter cover page.
What does yours say about your brand? If your cover page is a beautiful ocean, breathtaking scenery or a pet, how would your audience know what’s in it for them?
Your Twitter cover should be branded to you and help your followers know these things:
- How you can help your target audience.
- Let people know what they will get.
- Why should they follow you?
Between your friendly, smiling face and a powerful cover that is branded to you, your audience will have a better perception of you and how you can help them.
Here’s an example that meets the criteria for good Twitter profile images. A smiling, friendly profile photo creates a more welcoming page. The cover photo lets you know exactly what’s in it for you. See my arrows pointing to key areas of the profile images.
Next is your bio, which lets people know who you are. After reading your bio, your potential followers should know who you are and what’s in it for them.
Use hashtags in your Twitter bio for hashtag searches. Be sure to include a link to a landing page where you can capture a person’s email address too.
Here’s a guy who created a great Twitter bio. You know exactly what he offers, he uses hashtags and provides a link.
It’s very simple but gets the point across as to what’s in it for you.
2 – Build Your Twitter Audience
Unlike Facebook where you have to run ads to get likes on your Page, you can easily get followers on Twitter.
The first step is to find leaders and influencers. Go their Twitter page and click Followers. You can see all the people that follow that person.
Look through their followers but don’t follow just anyone. Be sure to follow people in your target market.
AND… be choosy about who your follow. For example, you don’t want to follow the one I put a red square around.
Scroll down until you find the right people to follow. Also if someone speaks a language you don’t understand, it doesn’t make sense for you to follow that person.
Be choosy about who you follow as well as who you follow back.
When it comes to following and followers, Twitter has some specific rules to follow.
At some point you have to unfollow people to keep the ratio correct or you won’t be able to follow more people.
Thankfully, there is a cool tool for that!
Manage Flitter is an easy way to filter people you want to follow and filter people you do not want to follow from Twitter.
It also shows you who is not following you back. Then you can easily unfollow them so you can keep your Twitter ratio correct.
For example, in my list of people who are not following back, there are 608 people.
I like to start with the people I have been following for the longest period of time. I give people a couple of weeks to follow back and then I can select the ones to unfollow.
There are a number of other features that ManageFlitter offers which can help you follow and unfollow more efficiently. Learn more about ManageFlitter.
3 – Use Visual Tweets
Images always get more engagement, even on Twitter. It’s come a long way from the days when it was a mostly text-based social platform.
That’s what you want. Retweets!
It’s not enough to just post your content with a link. Include a visually pleasing image to get the extra attention and stand out.
When creating a new tweet, click Add Photos or Video. This will attach the image to your tweet.
Twitter’s image requirements are up to 3MB and can be JPEG, PNG or GIF format.
There are many websites where you can find AMAZING images for free. Check out my article about the Best Stock Photo Websites.
You can use online tools like Canva.com or PicMonkey to add your own text or branding to the images.
Using imagery will get more attention and help drive traffic to your blog. Be sure to put a short link to your latest blog post so interested followers can easily click it.
4 – Retweet Other Tweets
Twitter is a social platform that is HUGE on reciprocity.
When you follow, people follow you back. When you share or retweet other people’s content, there is a better chance that they will then retweet your content to their followers.
See how that works?
Now a whole new audience can discover what you have to offer on your blog!
5 – Always Use Hashtags on Twitter
You can get a lot more engagement on your tweets with hashtags.
More engagement leads to more visibility of your tweets, which leads to more clicks on the links to your blog post.
Choose hashtags that make sense for the content you are sharing. You can also find leaders and influencers in your niche and see what hashtags they are using.
Another way to get a lot of engagement is to find the daily trending hashtags and join in the fun!
You can get high engagement and new followers using this method. On the left side, you can see a list of trends. These can be customized to your local area or to you.
You can join in the fun by using one of the hashtags that are trending at that moment. I’ve gotten tons of engagement and some new followers just by creating tweets using the trending hashtags.
You can also create your own hashtag that corresponds to your brand. When people start following and sharing your content, they’ll be using your unique hashtag too!
6 – Post Often on Twitter
To maximize engagement on your tweets, post at least 3 to 5 times per day. You can easily schedule a week or two worth of tweets to post to Twitter using scheduling tools.
One of my favorite is Social Jukebox. You can create tweets and then setup a schedule for them to post to Twitter.
Your tweets will be posted in a random sequence. Although you can also use the Targeted Posts feature if you want more control over the schedule.
One thing I love about Twitter is being able to reuse the same tweets over and over. The newsfeed goes by pretty fast in Twitter. So not everyone will see everything you post.
I like to keep a list of tweets and then recycle them all over again. My tweets range from inspirational quotes and memes, to blog post links with enticing text.
Final Thoughts
Today I showed you 6 ways you can take action on Twitter to gain more followers, get more engagement and clicks to your blog. The more followers you get and the more engagement from those followers, the better chance you have of them clicking your links to your blog.
That’s how you get traffic to your blog from Twitter.
Which of these steps will you take action on this week?
Thanks for the tips. I think my profile needs some work!