As with most things I write and talk about, blogs and podcasts are quite interchangeable in this subject.

1. Refine your Twitter identity (branding)

Pick three words or terms to describe your “brand,” write them into your bio, and tweet within those themes. It's okay to occasionally break from this mold, but these should be your focus. For me, it's comedy, web design, and my podcasts' themes.

2. Decide whether you need a separate Twitter account

Building a Twitter audience is tough. But keep in mind that your current audience may not like your new content. If you have a lot to tweet about your new blog or podcast, consider a separate account for the majority of it.

Never tweet the same thing from both accounts at the same time. Either rewrite the tweet or stagger the timing.

3. Don't make anything totally automatic

“Automatic” tweeting is:

  • impersonal—usually not targeted toward your audience on Twitter—
  • inefficient—automatic tweets can easily be at the wrong time or contain not-compelling text—and
  • irrelevant—”new post” doesn't matter to your audience, but writing a tailored tweet to them will be enticing.
So turn off the automatic crossposting, disable RSS feeds publishing to Twitter, and write your own tweets!

4. Schedule or “buffer” tweets about your content

But automatic can also be good—when it's not totally automatic. The best times to tweet are usually afternoon to evening. So use a Twitter client, like TweetDeck or HootSuite, that offers scheduling.

When you post new content, write a few tweets about it and schedule them to send one each day for about a week. Then schedule some more tweets about it later in the future.

Similar to this, don't spam your followers by tweeting a lot in rapid succession. Use Buffer to throw your tweets into a queue to be posted at customizable times throughout the day.

You can also use If This Then That to setup actions to automatically pull items from your RSS feed and schedule them for later tweeting. But still look over your Buffer and optimize your text.

5. Search for your audience

Use Twitter Search or an automatic search in your Twitter client to find people who will like your content.

Don't automate this or spam people! Reach out to them in a friendly way, create a connection, and then tell them about your content that they may like.

6. Add tweet buttons to your site

Social-sharing buttons make it easy for people to share your content on social networks (duh). I currently use the ShareBar WordPress plugin (and may change that soon), but there are many other great services, too, or you could add the official Twitter buttons.

Also consider adding the Twitter Blackbird Pie WordPress plugin UPDATE: paste a Tweet URL into a post on WordPress 3.4 to embed your own tweet about the post within the post, so others can retweet you.

Which leads int0 …

7. Be retweetable

Make it easy for your followers to retweet you to their followers.

  • Keep your tweets to fewer than about 120 characters (140 minus “RT @yourtwitterID: “), or shorter if you want to allow commentary.
  • Write your tweets to be less about “me.” For example, you could change “I just posted the newest episode of my podcast” to “Check out the latest episode of The Awesome Podcast,” or something more informative.
  • Tweet when your audience is looking at Twitter. This is usually afternoon to evening, but tools like SocialBro can help you determine when your followers retweet you the most.
  • Write stuff that your followers would want to say, too.

8. Write compelling titles and tweets

There's nothing compelling about “Episode 13.” There may also be nothing compelling about “Episode 13: [Episode Title],” unless you write a great title.

Write a title that sparks curiosity or sounds interesting. “My Secret Audacity Recipe for Great Audio” was a terrible title. Now, I refer to it as, “How to use Chris's Dynamic Compressor to make you audio sound great,” or, “How to use an audio compressor plugin to fix your volume problems.”

9. Tweet your content, not just your title

Your content is more than a title, so don't just tweet the titles. Pull quotations from your content or subpoints that you can tweet.

For example, your podcast episode may be, “10 Ways to Be Awesome.” You could tweet:

  • “Are you awesome? Here are 10 ways to find out! [link]”
  • “Wearing cool T-shirts makes you awesome. Here are 9 other ways. [link]”
  • “Did you know that awesome people get better food? [link]”
  • “Don't tuck in your T-shirt if you want to be awesome. [link]”

10. Track your success

Trying new things is pointless if you don't know whether they're working! If you use Google Analytics for website stats, add the following code to the end of your URL before you shorten it.

?utm_source=SOURCE&utm_medium=MEDIUM&utm_content=CONTENT&utm_campaign=CAMPAIGN

Yes, this is ugly. Here's what it means.

  • SOURCE is where web visitors came from. You could say “Twitter” or you could be specific with “theramennoodle_twitter” (this and other fields can contain dashes, underscores, and capitalization, but no other special characters or spaces).
  • MEDIUM is what kind of link it was. I use “tweet” for tweets, “banner” for banners, “qr_code” for QR Codes. As you can see, I don't have to be creative here.
  • CONTENT is an optional field, but works great for when you want to tweet different messages about the same thing, and you want to compare the success of each. CONTENT could be specific like, “10_ways_to_be_awesome” and “are_you_awesome”; or it could be general like, “a” and “b”; or you could remove “&utm_content=CONTENT” from it completely.
  • CAMPAIGN is what you'd call this marketing campaign. Keep in mind that this will be reflected across a visitor's entire time on your website, so what kind of content attracted them may be best here. You could write your episode's abbreviation, or the name of the movie that you talk about across multiple posts.
You can track this information under “Traffic Sources” in Google Analytics.
To make adding this tracking code easier, you could either use Google's URL Builder or do it more seamlessly with TextExpander for OS X ($17 through February 13) or PhraseExpress for Windows.

11. Be human and relationship-focused

Act like a human, not a spamming robot. Focus on building a relationship with a person first.

When I watch Twitter for people having problems with Audacity, I try to help them first, and then I let them know that I have a website and podcast with more help.

Do you like it when Twitterers only tweet the same links over and over, or only promote themselves, or flood Twitter with a dozen links at a time?

Although your goal is to grow your audience or connect people with your content, think about turning people into raving fans who are passionate about your content. That comes at a higher price than mindless subscribers, but their value is far greater.

What do you wish you did differently when you started and can't change now?

I'd like your feedback and stories for a future episode to talk about the things podcasts need to get right the first time. These would be things that can't be fixed later. This would be stuff like using a free website that gets shutdown without redirection, or many other things.

Please retweet this post!

Use the social buttons or retweet the following.

https://twitter.com/#!/theRamenNoodle/status/166638063576031232

Need personalized podcasting help?

I no longer offer one-on-one consulting outside of Podcasters' Society, but request a consultant here and I'll connect you with someone I trust to help you launch or improve your podcast.

Ask your questions or share your feedback

  • Comment on the shownotes
  • Leave a voicemail at (903) 231-2221
  • Email feedback@TheAudacitytoPodcast.com (audio files welcome)

Connect with me

Disclosure

This post may contain links to products or services with which I have an affiliate relationship and may receive compensation from your actions through such links. However, I don't let that corrupt my perspective and I don't recommend only affiliates.

About the Author
As an award-winning podcaster, Daniel J. Lewis gives you the guts and teaches you the tools to launch and improve your own podcasts for sharing your passions and finding success. Daniel creates resources for podcasters, such as the SEO for Podcasters and Zoom H6 for Podcasters courses, the Social Subscribe & Follow Icons plugin for WordPress, the My Podcast Reviews global-review aggregator, and the Podcasters' Society membership for podcasters. As a recognized authority and influencer in the podcasting industry, Daniel speaks on podcasting and hosts his own podcast about how to podcast. Daniel's other podcasts, a clean-comedy podcast, and the #1 unofficial podcast for ABC's hit drama Once Upon a Time, have also been nominated for multiple awards. Daniel and his son live near Cincinnati.
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Franckradio
Franckradio
12 years ago

Wow !!! I do like this post ! It’s fantastic. Thank you so much sir !

My podcast: http://www.franckradio.podomatic.com
My site: http://www.radioeben-ezerinternationale.com

PeeDeeFoodie.com
12 years ago

Just listened to this episode yesterday and I’ve already implemented a couple of the ideas. The first, embedded tweets, I’ve actually used on my sidebar for the overall site.  You can see it at http://PeeDeeFoodie.com  – that’s our blog, and our companion podcast is called the Pee Dee Food Show.  The Pee Dee is a region in northeastern South Carolina.

Thanks for pulling together this list. It’s a great resource for those, like me, still learning to optimize the benefits of Twitter.

Uwe Trenkner
Uwe Trenkner
12 years ago

At least over here in Germany, a lot of people feel unhappy with being tracked by all those social media buttons: Even users who do not use Facebook & Co are being followed everywhere by them, because on almost every page one visits nowadays, you find their buttons. They are loaded from Facebook, Twitter, Google etc. so that these companies can get an almost complete picture of which pages you visit when.

There is even a growing number of law experts who believe that these buttons do not comply with German laws as you give away personal information of your users, and especially to companies outside of our jurisdiction (thus not having to abide to the same privacy / data protection standards).

The German IT publishing house Heise has therefore started a project to insert 1 additional steps to social media buttons on web sites: First they are greyed-out and you have to click them once to activate them. Only then are they loaded from Facebook & Co. A second click then activates the normal function of the button.

Several WordPress plugins exist, which implement their code, e.g. “2 Click Social Media Buttons” or “WP-Social-Share-Privacy”.

While I think that social media are great for podcasters, no one should assume that all their listeners like them, too. Therefore, I would greatly appreciate if podcasters, bloggers and just about anyone implements privacy guarding steps such as those 2 click buttons.

Uwe Trenkner
Uwe Trenkner
12 years ago

Not quite true: These buttons themselves are loaded from the respective social media sites – not from your blog page. On this very page, the Sharethis bar includes an Iframe which is directly loaded from Facebook, Twitter, Google…. Thus, Facebook & Co “see” downloads from my browser/ip address on each page I visit which loads their buttons. Each GET-request typically also includes the referrer-URL, e.g. this web page. Since these buttons are used so ubiquitously, the relative social media company gets a very good picture of when I visited which web page.

This all happens without the user having to be logged into these social media sites. They do not even need to have an account, there. Just by including the buttons, the blog operator inadvertantly serves the social media companies their user information on a silver platter: Facebook & Co know quite exactly who was on your site, which pages they visited etc.

Apart from blocking Javascript, users can also evade this tracking by using tools such as the “Do Not Track Plus” extension for firefox: http://www.donottrackplus.com.

Joe O'Keefe
11 years ago

Daniel. Great show and really good for a twitter novice like me. Keep up the good work.

Joe O'Keefe
11 years ago

Just one twitter account @mylegaljoe which at this point is all I can handle. Hopefully that is good for now. Once I get my podcasts and tweets more consistent, I suppose I need to move on to Facebook (I’m a little behind the times…). Thanks!

Joe O'Keefe
11 years ago

I’ll get there eventually. I still have the real job and a wife and three kids that want to see me from time to time… Really enjoying your shows since I am using audacity. Keep up the good work.

Keith Hughes
11 years ago

Good advice!

trackback

[…] Napoleone @Vinny_Nap   Sources:  https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/tap067-11-ways-to-use-twitter-to-promote-your-blog-or-podcast/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/ […]

trackback

[…] you using Twitter as a tool or still just tweeting about mozzarella sticks with your buddies? If you just can’t […]

ClassyLittlePodcast
8 years ago

I’m sad the link in Point 5 is no longer active. Any other way to get that article? Thanks!

-Emily

ClassyLittlePodcast
8 years ago

Thanks for the quick response! No rush; we’re all recovering from a long weekend, after all. Besides, I’m busy playing around with IFTTT.com (you know, instead of doing actual work). Thanks for introducing me to it!

trackback

[…] you using Twitter as a tool or still just tweeting about mozzarella sticks with your buddies? If you just can’t adulterate […]

trackback

[…] you using Twitter as a tool or still just tweeting about mozzarella sticks with your buddies? If you just can’t adulterate […]

Scott
Scott
6 years ago

Thanks for this. It is very helpful. Scott at American Conservative University Podcast

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