Six Steps to Begin Using Twitter to Promote Your AC Content

Twitter has grown remarkably in popularity in the last few months. From something that was known mostly to "techies," Twitter has become a popular and populated social networking site. Many public figures now have Twitter accounts, from celebrities to politicians. If you want to publicize information quickly, Twitter is a great medium.

It's for this reason that new Content Producers should use Twitter as a marketing tool for their content. Twitter is free and, in my experiences, very effective. If you are a CP that wants to improve your daily PVs, here are some steps to follow.

Twitter Content Marketing Step #1 - Produce Content
Before you do anything, try to have between five to ten articles written so that you have content to promote, and so that when people go to your content from your Twitter account, they will be able to look at other articles of yours. Try to have some variety in these articles so that there is "something for everyone."

Twitter Content Marketing Step #2 - Register for Twitter
The next step in marketing your content with Twitter is to make a Twitter account. Already have one? Make another solely for your AC articles. Why? Using Twitter to market your content will require you to "tweet" about your content on a regular basis. If you have friends that are getting phone updates from your non-AC account and you begin to market on it, they could get very frustrated very quickly.

Before you begin to tweet about your content learn about things like hatchtagging, retweeting, and general Twitter etiquette. Post a descriptive bio and a link to your source page on AC. That way people that are interested in you will be taken to your articles. Make your first tweet about your intentions for your Twitter account. Then it is time to begin to follow people.

Twitter Content Marketing Step #3 - Follow People
If you have friends in the AC community, follow them. Follow other people that are on AC and Twitter. Also follow acnews and the different senior ACers that are on Twitter. Many of these people will follow you in return and will help you build a base of followers.

Twitter Content Marketing Step #4 - Register for Bit.ly
Bit.ly is a url-shortening service. A URL-shortening service is a necessity with Twitter, as tweets are limited to 140 characters. Unlike other URL-shortening services, you can register for an account with bit.ly. This allows you to save the shortened links that you make. Bit.ly is also unique in that you can track how many views each of your shortened links gets. This can help alert you to what topics are hot on Twitter, which articles have been marketed effectively, and to what extent your Twitter marketing is effective. It can also clue you in on how many page views you are getting so that you don't have to wait until the next day to see how a new article is doing. Bit.ly also allows you to tweet directly from their site. It is truly Twitter and AC friendly.

Twitter Content Marketing Step #5 - Sign Up for Twitter Autopost
AC has an option for Twitter autoposting. This is one thing that I think would be appropriate for a non-AC Twitter account. Your articles are posted when they are published, which is nice if you write articles and don't have time to market them immediately after they are published. Just using this, I saw my page views increase about fourfold on a daily basis. Use this with your AC and non-AC Twitter accounts.

Twitter Content Marketing Step #6 - Begin to Tweet
After you have written and published about ten articles, registered an AC-dedicated Twitter account, built a base of Twitter followers, registered for bit.ly, and signed up for Twitter Auto-Post on AC, it is time to tweet to promote your content.

When I tweet about my content, I use the following format:

Descriptive Title @ Shortened URL #4-5 relevant hatchtags

This lets people know what the article is about and where it is, and lets people find the topic on Twitter searches. I try to tweet about five to six articles per day, focusing on articles that are about current topics, such as movie reviews and news.

Tweeting about my content on a more or less hourly basis netted me over 330 page views in four hours. I tried to tweet about my articles about once an hour during that time. Many people would ask, "Wouldn't that get annoying for the people you are following?" If I were the only person they follow, probably. But most of the people following me are following 500 other people. I assume that my tweets could easily get buried under tweets by other people. So no, I'm not that worried. It's a marketing tool, and if you want to be effective in marketing, you have to make sure that people see your advertising. Tweeting about your content only once a day will probably not help you very much.

Twitter is a great market to promote your AC content. Smart practices and regular tweets can yield you hundreds of page views on a daily basis. If you have any suggestions about how CPs can use Twitter to market AC content, or if you have any Twitter marketing anecdotes of your own, feel free to share your experiences in the form of a comment. Thanks for reading!