Using Twitter for Those with Little Extra Time

With little time to devote to writing, progress on a web writing site can be laboriously slow. I need all the help I can get to promote my writing and get noticed on the web. I loved that Associated Content already had systems in place to auto-post links to our articles on our Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. Previously I had used Twitter only to follow friends and a favorite author, rarely tweeting anything myself. Facebook notices sit in my email box until there's about ten of them, at which time I will go and filter through the requests and notifications. Auto-posting has allowed me to not only have a larger presence on these social networking sites, but save time.

The AC Twitter Challenge was an enticing gem to get me motivated to be more actively involved in the Twitter community. I enjoyed browsing through the #bestofac hashtags after I would post something to see what else everyone was posting. As a rule, I only posted something to #bestofac once a week. They were also all my own articles. I posted links to my most popular pieces of content as determined by page view numbers, thinking that they were obviously the pieces that were the most interesting.

Overall, posting to #bestofac did help me gain page views. The first article I posted was a personal story about calorie counting and dieting. Posting to AC's Twitter hashtag got me around 20 page views. The second was a guide to getting free underwear from Victoria's Secret. This article had garnered me steady page views from 10-20 a day and the post to AC's hashtag didn't really increase page views much in the trend of the time. The day after posting my page view count showed 11 for the day. The final article I posted was a brand new article on Dan Brown's overuse of certain phrases in his newest book "The Lost Symbol." To date this is my most quickly rising article. The day after posting it to AC's hashtag I had 51 page views for the day. For this article there is no way to tell how much posting to AC's hashtag helped because it was also its first day on the market. I do believe that every little bit helps, however, and seeing that new-to-me AC people commented shows that they probably found it because of Twitter.

All of these articles were auto-posted to Twitter and Facebook within a few days of being published. I do think that auto-posting helps, though I don't usually receive comments on my work from people outside AC. This would indicate that my Facebook and Twitter real-life friends are generally not as inclined to read. But then again, depending on how many friends you have, Facebook's news feed can pass more quickly than Twitter's (which is still lightning fast), meaning that the announcement of your article can be lost on page 5 of a friend's news feed within a half hour. However, since there is practically no time involved in setting up auto-posting, there is little harm in having a Twitter account to post to.

The one downside to using Twitter as a promotion tool for Associated Content articles is that black hatters and ad spammers can use them negatively. Before I was trying to promote my articles, I had my settings set so that I had to approve people who followed me. I wasn't interested in stalkers, communicating personal facts with random people, etc. However, in order to actively participate in the AC Twitter Challenge, it seemed I needed to allow any followers without pre-approval. Black hatters (people who spin someone else's articles and stuff them with keywords to garner page views and thus ad revenue) can easily then follow you and get updated each time you write a new article. It only makes their job easier. Ad spammers just add thousands of people in hopes of being added back and simply post links to odd products. After a couple weeks I went through and blocked specific people who seemed suspicious. I did not do any adding of people to build my network during the challenge, and I was followed by about 20 people, around half of which were eventually blocked. I was pretty apprehensive about clicking links to check what people were promoting, but I couldn't think of a better way to see what they were about.

In finale, I did almost nothing and managed to begin building a network and garnered some additional page views. If you have little time, this is really the least you can do. It's also great to follow @acnews because they will update you with fun announcements. For example, I would not have known about the Halloween Haiku contest had I not had @acnews tweets set up to be sent to my phone. AC loves Twitter now and everyone should at least be testing the waters.