The Twitter Experience

Many people have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, but many people do not know what to do with it. While it may seem like just another teenage fad, Twitter can be very useful for professionals as well. As a writer, I joined Twitter (@Terri84) to have another way to manage and communicate with a virtual writing community. Unlike many people, I did not even have my personal friends as followers until just a few weeks ago.

As a writer, having people read your content is what you want to achieve. You want to consistently expose your writing to new people. I found Twitter to be an excellent tool for this process. Before, I was using my blogs, begging friends to check out m content and getting dismal numbers on my articles at AC and other websites. Now that Twitter is in my toolbox of promotional tools, I can get consistent views and find those that are interesting in what I am writing about.

For two weeks I promoted my AC content on Twitter. I was surprised at the results. I thought that I would get a few clicks the first day, but after promoting two articles a day for fourteen days, I received consistent clicking each day. What surprised me the most was that I even promoted seasonal content such as Easter poetry and still received a fair amount of article views.

Another unexpected result of promoting my AC content on Twitter is the additional followers I received. If I used specific hash tags to describe my content, I would get new followers within 24 hours that were interested in that topic. It also helped a lot to minimize the personal tweets and use writing-themed personal tweets to redirect followers to more content.

Sometimes following someone else is just as rewarding as getting someone else to follow you. Although I initially signed up for Twitter to follow Rob Thomas (@ThisIsRobThomas), I have found many people to follow including many writers. Some of the top tweets in my feed are from @GrammarGirl, @arjunbasu, and @writerscom.

Over the two weeks of my Twitter experiment, my page views at AC have risen enough to continue promoting them on Twitter. And with the new followers due to my content, I can reach a wider audience with my work. This will help expand my readership as well as help myself learn what type of content readers are most drawn to.