HOW TO Use Twitter Successfully If You Are Just Getting Started

This is a guest post by James Mignano. More about him at the bottom of this post.

Of all forms of social media, blogging is definitely my favorite. It gives people the chance to really show off what they know in an easily readable and shareable form. The key to maintaining a blog, though, is engaging an audience.

If nobody reads what I’m writing, my blog becomes nothing but a personal diary… except without the need for a good hiding spot.

I’ll even go one step further. It isn’t enough for me that people read my blog; the right people need to read my blog. I want an audience of like-minded people that are in the industry. In other words, begging my friends and family to read my blog doesn’t really cut it.

The power of Twitter for finding the right audience

Twitter is the perfect way to start and build relationships with the people that are important to what you are interested in that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to meet. For example, I have a relationship on Twitter with founders of social media applications, authors of best-selling books, and executives of PR agencies.

That’s not exactly something that I could do on Facebook, or any other site for that matter!

These are the people that I can learn from and be mentored by, and they are the people that will be my future colleagues when I graduate from college. These people compose the audience that I want to reach with my blog.

I am not conceited enough to think that when I post a new blog and tweet about it all of my followers immediately click through to see what I have to say. I’m just not that much of an influencer yet.

Therefore, my strategy has been pretty simple so far: use the influence that other people and organizations on Twitter have to my advantage.

Get other people to endorse you

It’s simple, really. Before writing a new post, I think about what I could write, and how I could include other people in it, so that they will share my post with their followers. When I tweet my blog to my small amount of followers, it doesn’t get a ton of hits.

However, when I get an endorsement from a larger organization or individual with more credibility, experience, and followers than I have, my blog stats spike! After writing a post, I usually use Twitter to pitch the post to other people that I have a relationship with that would find it interesting.

Let me clarify. I do not directly ask 40 or 50 random people to read my blog in hopes that they will ReTweet it. It’s more like asking 3 or 4 people that I know would enjoy the content or have some investment with the material to read my blog.

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t want people to see that I had basically said the same thing to four different people, one right after the other. That would appear to be slightly spammish! It’s similar to the reason why we use the “blind copy” feature of email to send press releases.

The power of combining Twitter and Buffer

With Buffer, I not only make sure the tweets about my blog post are posted at the times of highest traffic volume, but I also make sure that my pitch-tweets are spread out throughout a day or two, giving me time to tweet other things in-between.

When Twitter and Buffer meet at center stage, here are a few things that I observed happening to my blog:

• Increased traffic to the blog
• Increased comments on the blog
• Increased longevity of the article as I could post it a few more times
• Increased Twitter followers
• Increased engagement and building of relationships on Twitter

Now I would love to hear from you. How do you primarily use Twitter and Buffer? How do you primarily promote your blog?

Please share your tips in the comments below!

About the author:

James Mignano is a student at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. He is interested in Public Relations and Social Media. He blogs at Millennials Marketing and you can follow James @J_Mignano.

Want to guestpost for the Buffer blog? Email me leo@bufferapp.com