Using Twitter to Increase Your Visibility

I have become part of a great Twitter community in my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There is a group of about 50 of us who are actively involved and meet bi-weekly for different events and outings across the county. It has been fun to connect with locals who use social media outlets such as Twitter to increase their business opportunities, and community outreach.

Through Twitter, I also decided to use my Pen-Name to see if it would increase my Associatedcontent.com visibility. Before adding my pen-name to Twitter, I had roughly 37,000 hits on my freelance articles. After about a month of tweeting the links to my articles, I had 4,000 hits in less than a month. This was a significant increase from pre-Tweeting.

Twitter has become the new craze amongst Social Media outlets, especially for celebrities. I have heard numerous challenges for certain Hollywood Stars to reach 1,000,000 followers. There is no grand prize for achieving this many followers, but it is a great milestone for Social media.

By Joining Twitter, it allowed my articles to reach a new audience that otherwise may not have found me, or Associatedcontent.com. Twitter allows you to search for keywords. If you link your articles properly and promote them with proper keywords, a new audience may be able to find you and pass along your site to others.

Some great Tweeters that I follow, that have helped me to learn the Twitter ropes are: Kmueller62, modernglow, 20orsomething, jessm918, jbairy, shanellelee, c_visual, and Associated Content's own news feed, acnews. Do a search under "Find People" on twitter to find these great Tweeters.

With even just a 10% increase in visibility, by joining Twitter and promoting your work in a quality setting, you open your articles to an entirely new, creative exposure. You do want to avoid coming off as a bulk tweeter, however. The way to do this is to be authentic in your Tweets. You have 140 characters to put in your link to the article, as well as a brief, catchy description. Keywords are most useful, but you want them to sound appealing, and not like bad marketing.

Catchy phrases that are appealing to users, versus straight marketing, are most visible to the Twitter community. People now have the option to report certain Twitter accounts as bulk/spam. It is important that you distinguish yourself among the Social Media community as an authentic account, and one who contributes to the greater good of the Twitter community.

Opening a Twitter account is very easy. You just need an email address, a creative user name for people to easily find you, as well as a purpose for your tweets. Keep your focus strictly on your objective. If you want to have a personal Twitter account, open one separately from your business account to keep the focus.

Twitter can be a very useful, and create way to give the public access to more of your writing and articles. Just remember to keep it streamlined to your objective and to not over-market yourself.

You can find me on twitter as BLBoitson http://www.twitter.com/blboitson