Blogs are essential for businesses for a variety of reasons. For example, they can drive traffic to your website, help increase your SEO/ SERP and position your brand as an industry leader. Now you want to let your Twitter followers know you have just written an engaging new blog post that they should not miss. What steps do you take to create a buzz so your followers will get to that new blog article? While 8 out of 10 people will read a title, only 2 out of 10 will continue to read the article.
Capturing your follower’s attention through a captivating headline in your tweet is the first step. You want to use action words – more verbs and fewer nouns. You also want to give the readers a taste of your blog with the temptation to find out more.
Try A/B testing with your headlines to find out which headline is right for your tweet. A/B testing is randomized testing with two variants. It will gain insight into your followers behaviors and see which produces most positive results. First, come up with two headlines that you think will do well. Then tweet the headlines roughly the same time, about one hour apart. Compare the data when you check your metrics to see which headline performed better.
Another strategy is to ask a question in your headline. Hopefully, this will engage a person to want more information and either answer the question or follow the link attached to the question. If you are trying to promote a service or product, relate the question to the core of the issue you are discussing by identifying a good keyword or two that summarizes your question. Some good openers are:
- How do I..?
- Do you know how many people…?
- Are you having problems/struggling with…? This is a good query for technical issues as well as relationships.
- Do you want to know the best way to…?
Most likely, your Twitter followers are located all around the globe so not everyone will be online at the same time. This means you can easily tweet several messages throughout the day and mix in a few status updates about your new blog piece.
Use different words, different ideas, yet still related to the blog. That way you won’t sound like a broken record. There are tools you can use to share your content multiple times such as HootSuite and Buffer (along with other Twitter management tools that allow scheduling updates).
Because you are allowed to respond to anyone on Twitter, another tip is to monitor updates to find out who is asking questions that is related to your content. For example if your blog is about a software system for the insurance industry, you can do a search for that particular software such as “name” ?-filter:links. Then you will see who is asking about this topic. When you share your information, it will be seen as helpful, not intrusive, because they asked about it.
In your tweet, copy of the URL of your latest post and shorten the URL with one of the many URL shorteners and your tweet should include the shortened URL. TweetDeck is a dashboard application that has several built-in URL shorteners. Add Please retweet at the end.
Another way to get people to find your blog post is to use hashtags to get people to see your content if they normally don’t follow you.
As an overview, here are some important tips to remember for your tweeting your blog post:
- Blog post titles should be clear and concise.
- If possible, have the title show your blog solves a problem.
- Again, if possible, a bit sensational or wacky sounding can pique curiosity in followers.
- Use catchy phrases such as “Top 10 Reasons to” and “Tips For,”
- Use a title that is strikes an emotional chord.
You are now ready to tweet those blogs!