Twitter for Traffic: 5 Tips For Increased Presence

Many people use Twitter for personal reasons, but many more use it for businesses. In recent years, Twitter has become one of the major traffic sources for many businesses. These businesses have increased their presence on social networks, reaching out to more audiences through various tried and tested means.

Can Twitter help your business grow? If you do it right, then exponentially.

Understandably, it is easier for an established business or celebrity to garner a strong fan-following on twitter. But for those of us who are starting up a new business or a blog, traffic from twitter can be hard to come by.

Here are 5 tips that will help you gain genuine followers (hence popularity) and traffic on twitter. It is assumed that your business (or blog) link is available in your profile.

Tip 1: Tweet Positive and Actionable Posts

The world is already full of negativity. No one wants to read tweets about ‘This is very difficult, it cannot be done’ or ‘Most start-ups fail within the first 6 months’. Even though these tweets might be informative, people look away from them quickly as they don’t want to be dissuaded. On the contrary, most people want to be inspired, so make it happen. Post something of the kind ‘Hard work is the key to success’ or ‘Failing at a start-up is a life lesson, you will do better next time’. These positive tweets are nice and it is likely that people will check out more of your tweets.

Your tweets should also encourage action rather than a reaction. Tweeting something like ‘Task for today – List down all the things that went right yesterday’ will get people involved, to do something. This is more likely to be appreciated by your followers.

Tip 2: Share Content, Don’t Force

Tweets with links are never re-tweeted as often as tweets without. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, links take up lots of space, and it is recommended that your tweets should be shorter than 120 characters so that those who re-tweet can add their own value, if they wish. Secondly, people are sceptical of suggesting content they like to others (what if they don’t like the content too? Social value at stake); it tells of their personal taste and also seems intrusive. On the other hand, a quote or some knowledge-based opinion is easier to share.

Tip 3: Create ‘To-Go’ Tweets

This is a cool tip that you should implement whenever you are drafting up your blog-post or are in a meeting. Pick up a caption or catchphrase from the draft and save it in excel. When you are done drafting a post, you should have between 5-10 such catchphrases that you can use. Near to the launch of the post, you can put these catchphrases in twitter. This will benefit your business in two ways – more opportunity to re-tweet something unique you say, and drive traffic to you blog when you actually post the link to the post. When people like your tweets, they are highly likely to lookout for something you offer.

Tip 4: Reuse Content from People You Follow

There is no harm in this, seriously. Most people pick up content from somewhere on the web – some music lyric and some famous quote by Albert Einstein. It is better if you re-tweet, but consider a case where you don’t know where the information came from, you just stumbled upon a bookmarked page which was posted a month ago. There is no harm in tweeting about that, most people (and probably the author if they find out) will welcome the publicity and will appreciate a good read. Twitter after all, is a community.

Tip 5: Create Relationships

This point cannot be stressed enough! Relationships are the most important aspect of any business, whether it is offline or online. If you are just starting, or even if you have a big presence on the web, connect with your followers and like-minded people. Ask them about what they would like to read, or even something as simple as what their plans for weekend are! Getting to know someone personally and building trust and camaraderie with them will go a long way in establishing your business and increasing traffic and followers.

In that vein, feel free to add me on Twitter: @TheFreelancerD

If you have any questions about best practices in Twitter, chances are I can put you in touch with the kind of people you need for good mentoring. So let me know.

About the Author:

Neeraj Sachdeva is a psychology-motivated blogger who writes about Freelancing and Self-Improvement, often together. Check out his latest post (and Free Quiz) on Motivational Goal Seeking . You can find his take on The Art of Persuasion  as well as his logic-driven post on The Essence of Friendship  over at The Next Goal, part of WBB Survivor contest.

Tags: Traffic, Twitter

Category: Social Media