Why do you use social media?
If your answer is anything other than to be “sociable” you may be doing it wrong. Trying to sell products or increase traffic to your blog are not the only reasons to be on Twitter or Facebook.
On CookEatShare there is a group called “Twitter Cooks”, the idea being to make it easier to follow your friends on Twitter. It’s a great idea, finding people to follow can be hard – it’s hard to be sociable with “celebrities”. The first post was a “Hi, my name is @X”. However the second post was along the lines of “I’m @Y. What tools do you use to you promote your blog on twitter?”.
I think this is looking at it the wrong way, and not because the guy was trying to promote his blog. Sure we all want to promote our blogs, we think our content is useful of course we want people to see it. It was because of the tools.
What tools do you need for Twitter? A web browser and a login. As far as I can see that’s all you need to promote anything on twitter.
The post went on to outline the “strategy” he was using already – scheduled daily tweets to both Twitter and Facebook.
Sending auto generated messages out day after day in order to get people to buy products or click links, could be seen as spam.
Social media is about being social, trying to fake it will mean that people don’t follow you in the first place, or they ignore most of your tweets.
You need to interact, and show that you are a person, respond to tweets in your feed, ask questions, get conversations going.
Talk about your successes and failures, I like the failures the most. You can learn so much more from a failure than from a perfect experience and it’s always good to laugh 😉
Talk about stuff unrelated to your blog. The idea is to be a person that people like. Then people will want to follow you, they will trust you and will want to follow links that you tweet.
So my strategy, when I have time, is to be a person and use Twitter to talk about my life, sure I automate links to my brand spanking new posts, but that’s the only automation I do.
Why do you use Twitter or Facebook? Or if you don’t why not?
You can follow me on Twitter I’m @CoffeeMuffins.