There are over 300 million people tweeting around the world each day. They are sharing thoughts, taking photos and videos, and importantly for bloggers, writers and content marketers, there is nothing better than Twitter for content marketing – it’s a great channel for sharing links to articles, videos and resources.
If you are writing content, such as articles or blog posts, and you aren't yet using Twitter for content marketing, then you are missing an extremely important part of your content promotion mix.
If Twitter is used well, it can drive tons of traffic to your blog or website. However, simply auto-tweeting the title of the blog post with a link back to your website every time isn’t going to work.
Social referral analytics
There are six important steps in using Twitter for content marketing;
Finding your audience
Engaging your audience
Curating related content
Sharing your content
Thank people who share
Review your analytics
Let’s go through each of these steps in more detail.
Finding your audience
If you plan to use Twitter for content marketing efforts, then you have to build a sizable audience. The easiest way to get followers naturally, is to follow them first.
The people who are most likely to appreciate the content you are tweeting are those who tweet similar content. There are a number of different tactics you can use to find these people, and follow them.
Start by clicking on a relevant hashtag, and see who is sharing or tweeting using that hashtag.
Another method is using Twitter Search to uncover who shares other related content, and looking at what else these accounts share. You can even get a little smarter, and use the URL search operator to find people sharing your competitors content (example).
Twitter Search
These are manual methods, and there are also a number of automated tools that will help you uncover Twitter accounts that you should consider following.
The screen grab below shows how Manage Flitter works. Tools like this are a lot smarter than manual methods, as you can search by all sorts of filters, to ensure you uncover only the most likely accounts.
Using Manage Flitter to find potential audience
Engaging your audience
Twitter is often misused as a broadcast medium; people set up accounts, blast 20 tweets every day about their product, and then wonder why they have awful engagement. That’s one huge Twitter for content marketing fail.
Repeat after me; Twitter is a two way communication tool.
If you plan to just hook up an RSS feed and never engage, then the best of luck to you. It is typically very difficult – unless you are a large media company – to get away with that sort of behavior, and frankly, it’s very lazy.
The better approach is to mix your own content shares, with other content, and off the cuff ‘ad lib’ personal tweets. For example, my most engaged tweet so far this month, was when I complained about US marketers not considering their international audience. It didn’t have a link, an image or even a hashtag.
Curating related content
There is nothing worse than seeing a Twitter account sharing their own content over and over and over again. It makes your account look purely self-promotional. You need to make the effort to find related content that is high quality, and useful for your target audience if you want to effectively use Twitter for content marketing.
If you have Hoot suite or Buffer, you can use the content curation service, Quuu, to automatically queue up related posts in specific categories. They have a free plan, which means you can tweet their curated content twice a day for zilch.
Another method that works well for me, is to export my spreadsheet as a CSV, add appropriate hashtags, and share these. Why just use all that hard work for just my newsletter?
Another more advanced method, is by using a content discovery tool, such as what comes with Ahrefs, which makes collation of content to possibly share a breeze. Simply search for a phrase (see screen shot below), sort by shares, download as a CSV, and then check out the links – this ensures you know the content you’re sharing – and queue it up with appropriate hashtags.
Using Ahrefs to uncover content
Sharing your content
The most important tactic for anyone using Twitter for content marketing, is sharing your own content. If you want to do it well, however, you need to do more than tweet just the article title and link. The more effort you put into writing your tweets, the better the result.
For example, here’s a tweet my digital marketing agency made recently, about an article we had recently written (which we have shared at least six times now, to maximize awareness).
Follow