Name: Neicole
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/neicolecrepeau
Personal Blog: http://nmc.itdevworks.com/
Bio: Creator of TweetPackage.com, I'm a tech industry veteran with 25 year in the industry. I've done technical writing, usability testing, user interface design, and product and program management work. Most recently I've been applying a research and marketing perspective to social media and blogging about that on my personal blog, http://nmc.itdevworks.com. I'm also a mother of four wonderful children and wife of a terrific man--who also happens to be a fantastic software developer.
Posts by :
- Specific–It contains specific instructions for actions to take, rather than a general discussion.
- Complete–It provides a full solution for the problem it addresses, so it doesn’t leave the reader hanging.
- Easy to use–The layout of the information and the text itself make it easy for the user to follow the instructions.
- You can create better headlines and tweets. Actionable posts give you great fodder for headlines. “What three steps will improve your affiliate strategy?” “How your marketing plan should change, based in light of the latest research” and so on.
- Actionable headlines will get a better click-through. Aren’t you more likely to click on headlines and tweets that suggest the content will give you concrete information?
- Your content is more likely to be shared, and you may get better SEO results, too. Your post actually answers a question or solves a specific problem. That’s the kind of content people share and also the kind of content they hope to get back in Search results.
- It positions you as an expert. Information that actually gives people specific instructions for how to do something is expert information. When you provide it, you are seen as more of an expert.
- Plan to share your lists outside of Twitter
- Add yourself to your List (if necessary)
- Name your List well
- Create Lists for your target audience
- Promote and share your lists in the right manner
- Who is my target audience?
- Does my audience fall into distinct segments with different needs or interests? If so, define each segment.
- What are their goals, as they relate to the topics I blog about?
- What kind of information helps them reach those goals?
- What kind of information is this type of person generally interested in?
- Who on Twitter regularly tweets that kind of information? What Twitter resources can be valuable to this audience segment, given their goals?
- Get a sense of what the post is about.
- Jump to the section that interests them.
- bolding
- a colored font
- italics
- underlining
- emphasize your list
- draws the user’s eye
- and forces you to be succint–which helps the scanning reader
- 40% access Facebook several times a day
- 33% use it at least daily
- 20% use it several times a week
- The remaining 7% use it weekly
- Studies have shown that over 50% of all visits to pages last 10 seconds or less.
- Users only read about 20% of the words on a page.
- Users make a decision in seconds as to whether to continue reading the page or leave.
- When one item
- is next to another item
- the two are considered to be related in some way
What Will Content Look Like?
February 3rd, 2010
Studies tell us content remains king. Apple goes where the money is. Its decision to enter the market with a device explicitly focused on content delivery is just another indication that engaging content presented well will draw consumers.
The blog will continue to be a critical element in marketers’ social media strategies. And with the expected increase in businesses using social media, competition for readers is only going to grow. So what’s a blogger to do?
The Battle for Readers
The battle for readers is going to be won by the bloggers who provide the most useful and entertaining content. Our toolkit now includes video, podcasts, slideshows, and the original medium, text. Using these different media well and combining them effectively is one of the skills bloggers can use now, to improve their readership. Just as competing products can differentiate on ease-of-use, blogs can compete on how effectively and engagingly they present their information.
My guess is that tools like the iPad will encourage authors to integrate video more tightly with text and intermix the various media in more effective ways. Instead of putting a video on your blog, possibly with a text version below it, you can create abbreviated text punctuated with shorter video clips to illustrate the point. 
Content Tools
The future holds more, though. For many years, I worked as a senior technical writer at Microsoft. I always had a strong bent towards usability and user experience, though. I was known for blurring the lines between assistance and UI. I see a similar blurring of content and tools, in the near future.
Creating a post with a checklist of SEO steps for websites? Don’t just offer the user a text list. Provide a tool the user can run against their web pages to get an assessment. For each item the user needs to correct, link to video and text instructions. If you also let users save their information to come back to at later time, you’re guaranteed a repeat visitor and another chance to promote yourself.
Blogging about how to develop a measurement plan for social media efforts?Describe the elements of good measurement plan, sure. But go one better. Provide an expert system that asks the user questions about common goals and strategies. Based on the answers, generate an initial strategy outline for them, along with relevant content from your blog post archives. Generate it as a PDF or a Word document they can save—and be sure to include links to your site and ebooks.
Which would you rather have: a video of how to do SEO, or an interactive tool that walks you through the process on your own site?
My Crystal Ball
If this seems far-fetched now, it won’t for long. It’s possible to build this kind of content tool, now. If you blog for a business, you might decide it’s worth hiring a developer or using internal development sources to create these kinds of blog tools. A site providing a good, free tool that solves a common problem for your target audience is a link that’s going to be referenced and shared. Not only will users share it among themselves, but other bloggers are likely to include links to your tool on their blogs, helping your search rankings. It also provides PR opportunities. Content tools can be well-worth the investment to develop them.
If you’re an independent blogger or a small business owner, you probably can’t afford to hire a developer. You’ll have to wait for Wordpress and third party developers to build generalized tools and widgets to support this kind of content. Don’t worry. As the competition for readers grows, developers will see the opportunity to make money through innovative content tools. My crystal ball says it won’t be long before even the smallest bloggers can provide interactive content.
Make your Blog Invaluable!
November 19th, 2009As someone who worked in usability and technical writing for many years, I’ve developed a mantra: make your content actionable. For technical writing, that means doing everything you can to make the Help or user assistance actually aid the user in completing whatever task they are trying to complete–going so far as to add interactive tools to the Help topics. 
More and more, I’m applying this same principle to my blog posts. While there are plenty of posts that are meant just to be read and enjoyed, creating actionable posts serves to make them more useful for your readers–and make your readers more likely to share the post with others.
In this post, I’m going to define actionable blog posts, give you some ideas of the types of articles that can be made actionable, and explain some of the benefits. In a follow-up, I’ll talk about how to structure actionable posts.
What are actionable posts?
An actionable post is one that enables a reader to take concrete steps to solve a problem or reach a goal. Content that is actionable is:
Let’s say that you’re blogging about how to use a Wordpress plug-in. To make the content actionable, you would be specific and complete, giving the user information such as: the name of the plug-in, what circumstances or scenarios it’s helpful for, where to download it from (with a link), how to install it (or a link to very good instructions), and how to use it, step-by-step. You’d probably break the post up into sections for downloading, installing, and using it. And you’d use the HTML ol element to create a numbered list with instructions.
What posts are good candidates?
Some posts are obvious candidates for actionable content. They are about how to improve your blog, your relationship with our kids, your marketing plan, etc. The whole post can be one big action plan.
Others are not so obvious. A lot of the posts that I do are presenting research results or analyzing industry information and trends. You might think that presenting research results or analysis aren’t good candidates for being actionable blog posts. Actually, they are. After all, while I like research for research’s sake, I find it even better if I can draw conclusions from the research about how to improve my business or life.
Ask yourself these questions to determine if your post could be made more useful:
Can I draw conclusions from the information I’ve provided?
You’ve distilled information from a study and presented it. Can you link that to your readers’ everyday lives or work? Maybe it was a study on mobile marketing trends or how viruses spread globally. Are there implications for what readers should do to improve their business, protect their health, etc.?
Are there specific actions I can suggest people take, to leverage this information?
Ask yourself what specific actions you can recommend people take, based on the information you’ve provided. Maybe your blog post is about taking life’s curve balls with a sense of humor. Can you provide specific suggestions for what to do in order to get in a humorous mood when life throws you a wild one? Or how to kick yourself mentally into funny mode? If your post is about how illness spreads through schools and the workplace, can you create a checklist for your readers of actions they can take to prevent illness?
Can I give people guidelines to help them make a decision based on this information?
Another way to make content actionable is to give people a set of questions they can ask themselves, to make a decision relevant to your post. For example, say you frequently do product reviews. For each review, add a new section “Is X for you?” In that section, put a bulleted list of questions the reader can answer to decide if the product is right for them.
“Is the Flip right for you?” might include questions like: Do you have a limited budget? Do you find you rarely video because you always forget your camera or it’s too cumbersome to lug around? Do you have to film a lot of events at night or in darkened areas? And so on.
Benefits of actionable posts
For your readers, the benefits of actionable posts are obvious: they can use them to make a real difference in their lives, now. There are some benefits for you, as well:
Actionable content is more valuable to your readers and is more valuable to you. So, next time you write a post, ask yourself, “Can I make this actionable?”
Basics: Grow your blog with Twitter’s List feature
October 20th, 2009(You can follow me on Twitter: @neicolec)
Twitter will shortly be releasing its new Lists feature. As I blogged about, I have hopes this will help reignite Twitter’s growth. I think bloggers can play a key role in doing that. If businesses and bloggers see enough benefits from Lists and use them right, they can be an enabler of Twitter user-growth.
In this post, I discuss how to use Lists to create a cycle: visitors to your blog follow you (via a List) on Twitter, Twitterers see your tweets, which lead them back to your blog.
Basic steps:
Note, step 4 is the one that requires the most thought, but will determine your results. Start thinking about this now, before Lists are released.
1. Plan to share your Lists outside of Twitter
Everyone is planning on sharing their lists within Twitter. But don’t stop there. Plan on sharing the links to your lists on your blog.
Lists will be accessed via a URL like this: http://twitter.com/user_name/list_name. To promote the list on your website, you’ll just add a link with the URL. And you don’t have to stop there. Why not share them on Facebook, in email, and through your newsletter?
2. If necessary, include yourself in your Lists.
I haven’t been able to use Lists myself, yet. So I’m not certain on all the details of how they are being implemented. Specifically, I haven’t seen information about whether the List creator is automatically included in the List and/or whether their tweets are automatically included. (If you’re in the beta, please comment and let me know.)
If they aren’t, then make sure to add yourself to any Lists that you promote on your blog. (I’m assuming Twitter’s feature doesn’t prohibit this. If it does, they shot themselves in the foot.) That is part of the benefit that you get from creating and sharing lists–subscribers see your tweets, too.
3. Name your Lists well
You’ll give your Lists names, and those names will be part of the URL. Naming your Lists may not be as important as choosing your Twitter handle, but it is important. You want the name to be enticing but accurate. One key type of List I’m recommending is what I call a Twitter Solution (see #4). When you create a Twitter Solution, make sure your name reflects the goal or problem you are solving for your audience.
4. Create Lists for your target audience
The first use for Lists that most people will think of is creating a “Top X” List, such as My Top Social Media Picks or Top Sports Bloggers on Twitter. Sure, you will want to create some of those lists and promote them on your blog. In fact, you should always keep Lists in the back of your mind and use them if a List makes an appropriate accompaniment to a blog post. But keep in mind that there is a limit of 20 Lists per account, so you will want to use them only for your best posts.
Aside from posts, you want to think strategically. Take a marketing approach and think of Lists as a marketing tool. Ask yourself these questions:
Now, using the answers to that last question, create one or more Lists for each audience segment, designed to meet their goals. That’s a Twitter Solution.
5. Promote your Lists in the right place and manner
Obviously, you’ll have to decide where to put your Lists on your site. But since your blog page is the place where most users will arrive or go, you will want to put your key Lists there. Put the List link in a visible location near relevant content. If you already have a Follow Me button, you’ve probably put it in a prominent location, and that’s the same location where you’ll likely want to put your Lists.
The point of creating these Lists is to provide a valuable resource to your audience, and gain some followers in the process. As discussed, you probably already have a Follow Me button on your site. But people are going to be more inclined to follow a List than a single individual. A List, promoted as a Twitter Solution to their goal, is a lot more appealing than just little old you. Sorry.
So, promote your List as a Twitter Solution. For example, If you’ve created a list for first time home buyers, don’t just say “Use my List.” Say something like:
“I’ve created a Twitter list chock-full of Twitter resources to help first time Seattle home buyers learn more about the home-buying process, and connect with local resources. Just click Seattle Home Buyers to join Twitter and use its many resources to find your perfect home.”
Or you might use a graphic (surely we’ll see badges for Lists, soon) to highlight your List:
New home buyers: click here to see Twitter resources
to help you find your new home
That’s the basic strategy for using Lists to grow your blog. I hope you have fun with Lists–and are able to find some new followers through them. I’m a contributor to the Bloggers’ Bulletin. Watch my own blog for my next post, where I’ll give you some ideas for using Lists in unique ways.
Tips and Tricks I Learned as Technical Writer (Part 3)
October 4th, 2009We’ve talked about the need to make scannable blog posts and how the visual system works. We’ve talked getting the right toolbox to create scannable posts. Now, let’s talk about how to put your tools to work.
| Use headings as sign-posts | |||
| Especially if your post is long, use headings to break it up and show what is covered in each section. Be succinct, but accurately capture what’s in the section. This allows people to:
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| Call out the key points in your paragraphs | |||
| This is where I use bolding. But you can also use font color or even italics (with the caveats discussed in my second post). I like to highlight the key points of my post by bolding sentences throughout it. That way, if someone just looks at the bold sentences, they’ll get the main points.You can bold sentences or parts of sentences. Just make sure you structure the sentence so the bolded part can stand alone and make sense.As I said, you can use any of a variety of methods for emphasis:
Whichever method you choose, though, pick one and stick with it throughout your post. Don’t use two or three different methods for emphasis. Why? Remember in my first post I talked about how items that are visually similar are considered related. If you use a red font for some items and bolding for others, people instinctively think that there is something similar about all the red items versus all the bold items. If there isn’t, you confuse people and cause them to focus on trying to figure out that problem rather than focus on what you’re saying. |
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| Call out highlights with pull quotes | |||
| I use pull quotes to both highlight important information and to entice users. I generally use them for my more witty or controversial statements, as a way of hooking poeple to keep reading or at least scanning. Use pull quotes sparingly and only for your best stuff. | |||
| Use bullets or other grouping mechanisms to give users “information chunks” | |||
| By information chunk, I mean something like specific recommendations, suggestions, checklists, specific tools, a list of links, and so on. Use bullets to present these. Or use a table or some other structure that visually groups and sets the items apart (usually through indenting).Why? Using bullets or other grouping mechanisms serves to:
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| Use pictures when they best present the information | |||
Let’s compare two ways of presenting information:
For Facebook users age 25-34: The chart is the best way to present this information. Even if I bolded some items in my bulleted list, the chart would be better. Why? Because the reader can understand the data and the implications more quickly through the visual. Saying that 40% of users access Facebook daily doesn’t have the same impact as seeing that big chunk of the pie. The reader immediately sees the large difference in use, without having to make any effort at mentally processing the information. One clue that a picture is appropriate: if you realize your readers are going to be painting a picture in their head by reading your description, consider just giving them the picture to begin with. |
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| Avoid the wall of text | |||
| I usually write my text, and then make an editing pass for scannability. That’s where I add the bolding, add headings (if I didn’t begin with them), insert pictures, and decide whether to move some items into bulleted lists, etc.If you’re reviewing your post and you see a block of paragraphs or a third of a page that is just plain text, do something. Add emphasis, break the paragraphs into a bulleted list, even add an unnecessary graphic to just liven up the page and break up that text. This is where you might use lines or little graphical flourishes to just give the page some space and make it feel more readable. | |||
Finally, take that extra time to scan it yourself. Don’t read, just skim over the page and see what jumps out. Nothing? Something? The something you want? When the items that jump out convey the message you want, you’re post is ready to be scanned, or read, and it’s time to publish.
Tips and Tricks I Learned as a Technical Writer (Part 2)
September 28th, 2009Last week I blogged about the way the visual system works and suggested some implications for blog post formatting. This week, I want to get specific. But first, if you didn’t read last week’s post and you’re wondering why bother, here are pictures of two blogs (I’ve attempted to hide the specifics). Which one would you rather read?
Even with images this small, most people would immediately choose the second one.
I went to the first blog because the headline in LinkedIn made it sound interesting. It probably is. But I didn’t stick around to read it. It just looked too long and intimidating. The second one, on the other hand, is inviting. It was easy to get the main points just by scanning.
As a blogger, that’s what you want to strive for. Given that you need to optimize your posts for scanning, the very first step is to make sure you have the tools to do so. In Wordpress, the tool is your theme. If you’re not using Wordpress, it might be your template or your CSS stylesheet. Whatever the case, you can’t build a scannable post if you don’t have the basic building blocks to do so.
At a minimum, here are things I would look for in a platform or theme:
| Whitespace | You’ve all heard that one before, but it’s true. Your theme should be airy. You want plenty of padding between the body (your posts) and any columns or chrome. It helps the user distinguish the “blog” from the rest of the site. Remember the proximity point from my first post? Whitespace helps create groupings that leverage that proximity principle. |
| Multiple heading levels | I like to have at least three levels of headings. Headings are an obvious way to allow the user to scan your post and get a feel for the content. Having several levels allows for subheadings and lets you create hierarchical relationships in your post. |
| I don’t always use the headings as intended, though. Sometimes I use them as just a simple formatting technique to emphasize a sentence here or there. | |
| Bold, italics, and colored fonts | Bold is a must. I’ll often bold key sentences in paragraphs throughout my post, to call out all the high points. That way, if someone just skims the article, they’ll read the bold items and get the critical information. It’s nice to have a less heavy way to add emphasis, and I sometimes use italics for that. Italics are generally considered not as readable online, though, so use them sparingly. |
| Ideally, my theme gives me the opportunity to use colored fonts. Of course, you have to be careful with this for several reasons. Color-blindness is one. Also color is used to indicate links, so people may think that the text you’ve colored is a link. For that reason, don’t use blue (the conventional link color) for emphasis. I like a muted red, if possible, because most sites don’t use red for a link color, and it draws the eye well. It’s not a friendly color for the color-impaired, though. On the other hand, the emphasis isn’t critical. | |
| Pull Quotes | I’ve installed the Pullquote plugin for Wordpress, and I use it frequently. I really like pull quotes because they draw the eye, break up the wall-of-words, and are a great way to highlight the best sentences in your post. I use them especially in my long posts, scattering them relatively evenly throughout the page. (I do wish I had a little more control over where they appear though.) |
| Lines | I haven’t used the line technique that much, but adding lines between sections or paragraphs, either plain lines or graphical ones, is a good way to break up the page and group items. Your theme may not provide this. One way to get around that is to insert a graphic that’s an artsy line. Another technique is to insert a table with one row and one column and no left or right border, in order to set content apart. I used this technique on a couple of my posts to highlight an “advertisement” for people to take a survey I was conducting.
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These are some of the tools you should look for in your theme. Presumably, you have the ability to also insert graphics and use ordered and unordered lists (bullets), as well. Those are also important elements to use for scannability. Once you have the tools, you need to remember to put them to use. In the next post, I’ll talk more about some specific ways to use these various tools to make your post scannable.
Tech writer tricks I learned–that can help your blog! (Part 1)
September 19th, 2009For much of my career, I worked as a technical writer. I learned a lot about presenting the written word online. Much of it is applicable to blogging, and I find I use many of same tricks on my blog that I used doing online Help. I also obtained a certificate in User-Centered Design and spent a considerable amount of time doing usability work. I’ve learned some valuable information and techniques that can help you make your blog more usable.
If you’re wondering whether you really need to put effort into the usability of your blog, consider these facts:
People don’t read, they scan
I twice had the opportunity to use Microsoft labs to test how users read online content. The first time was in the late 90’s. In that test, subjects failed in their tasks even when using the Help. The reason quickly became clear. They didn’t actually read the Help, they just skimmed it. And skimming didn’t work, given our Help design.
The second usability test, about five years later, was with eye-tracking software, where heat maps revealed exactly where users’ eyes went in the online content. Where did their eyes go? To the bold text.
Many studies have shown that users scan web pages, rather than read them. So the first, and most important thing to know is, your audience isn’t reading your posts. They’re scanning.
As part of my coursework to get my UCD certificate, I took a terrific class in how the visual system works. Here are some of the key learnings that are relevant to blog layout.
Our eyes gravitate to pictures
Visuals, especially isolated ones in a sea of text, draw our eyes. The human face, especially, draws us. In fact, people’s eyes, from babyhood, are instinctively drawn to picture of human faces.
We respond to movement
If you are looking at a still scene or page, your eye will be drawn to any movement. We react instinctively to movement. Think of our ancestors, looking out over the tall grassland. The slightest movement drew the eye, because those blades of grass that just shifted might be a stalking tiger.
Items that are different are assumed to have greater importance
On a page that’s a sea of text or in a paragraph where all the letters and words look pretty much the same, anything that STANDS OUT both draws our attention and is automatically assumed to be more important.
Again, if you’re an ancient human looking at a sea of green and white grass, and there’s one orange spot, your eye is immediately drawn to that orange spot. You give it more attention and deem it more important. If you didn’t react that way instinctively, you’d probably be tiger-chow.
Close proximity indicates a relationship
An element that is apart from them is considered to be specifically unrelated to them.
Items that are visually similar are considered related to one another
Even when items are scattered over a page, if they are visually similar, our brain creates a relationship between them. That’s why headings work. Sentences that appear in the same font face, style, and size, even if dispersed over a page, will be considered as somehow having a relationship. Thus, on this page, all the left-justified, bold sentences standing alone are considered headings of the same level.
By now, you’ve probably picked up on a few of the tricks I use. But in my next post in this series, I’ll spell out some key techniques you can take advantage of to improve the usability of your posts–even if your theme or template is fairly limited.
3 Steps to Promoting Your Blog via Twitter
September 1st, 2009I recently posted a discussion on LinkedIn, asking people to take my survey on promoting your blog with Twitter. One of the comments I got was from a woman saying she wanted to promote her blog on Twitter, but didn’t really know how. I decided to write this article for her and others like her. (Warning, I do plug my Twitter app in this post, but only twice and only because it’s actually useful to you.)
I won’t try to sell you on all the benefits of promoting with Twitter. Instead, let me just point you to bloggers like SugarJones and KellyOlexa, who have followings of thousands and tens of thousands. Obviously, when you get to those levels, it takes less promotion to generate more returns in visits to your blog. This Social Media post also shows how powerful Twitter can be.
So, here are three simple steps to begin promoting your blog using Twitter.
Step 1: Join and learn the ropes
The first step is to join and spend a little time understanding the basics. To join, I’m going to recommend you use one of our Tweet Packages. You can click this link to follow people who tweet about social media marketing—exactly the kind of tweets you’ll want to read as you learn how to promote your blog. If that doesn’t appeal to you, go to Find a Package to find a topic that does interest you, like wine, authors on Twitter, football, etc.
The package will ask you to either log in or join Twitter, if you don’t have an account. After you log in or join, you’ll be automatically signed up to follow a number of people, as well as have some hash-tag searches added to your saved searches.
Get Started with Twitter
You’ll immediately see some tweets from the people you’re following, so you can get a sense of what this Twitter thing is all about. If you’re totally new to Twitter, I suggest you go to our Getting Started page which explains the basics of using Twitter, including what an RT, DM and # are.
Create your profile
Make sure that you go to Settings and create a basic profile. At a minimum, upload a picture of yourself—that’s a must, and link to your blog. Also, write a one-line bio that includes mention of what you blog about.
Then, just sit back and watch the stream. Try to go to Twitter at least a couple of times a day for the first week or so. Click on some of the links you see tweeted. Maybe click on the names of some of the people tweeting to go to their streams and view everything they’ve tweeted. Just listen and get a feel for things.
Step 2: Tweet
After you’ve spent a week or so getting a feel for this Twitter thing, it’s time to tweet. Just enter a 140 character message (or less) in the What are you doing? box and click Update. Don’t worry too much about what you’re tweeting. It doesn’t have to be anything brilliant or particularly interesting.
You can tweet about what you did today, what you had for dinner, what you’re thinking about blogging about, etc.
Over the week, tweet here and there. Don’t expect a response. You’re not likely to get one at this point. You might not even have anyone following you. Don’t worry about that, yet.
But do take some time to reply to some of the tweets you see. (Check the Getting Started to see how.) And ask a question here or there in your replies to people. See if you can initiate a conversation, even just a minor one.
Tweet a link
Also, tweet links a few times during the week. To do that, you’ll want to join a service like bit.ly (it’s free). After you join and enter your Twitter account information, you can create the tiny URLs that you see in tweets. When you find an article or blog post of interest, just copy the URL from the address bar, go to your bit.ly account, and paste it into the Enter your long link here box. Click Shorten to get your tiny URL. The URL will appear in two places, including the Share box with a Post button under it. Type a message in front of your tiny URL and click Post to tweet the link.
DON’T promote your blog, yet. Hold off on that.
Step 3: Develop your Tweet Strategy
Now that you’ve gotten a feel for this whole Twitter thing and gotten used to tweeting, it’s time to develop your tweet strategy. This is where you’ll figure out how to tweet in such a way as to gain followers and promote your blog. And this is where a lot of people flounder.
Promoting your blog is marketing, pure and simple. Like any marketing, you need to define your audience and then figure out how to reach them. You also need to hone your message, if you haven’t already done so.
Hopefully, since you blog, you are pretty clear about your message. “I blog about x.” X, in the form of your blog, is what you’re selling. So, if you blog about wine and food, then you are selling wine and food. If you blog about politics, then politics (your particular brand) is what you’re selling.
Define your audience
Based on this, you need to define your audience. Who are you trying to attract to your blog? If you blog about wine, you’re probably trying to attract regular wine drinkers and aficionados. If you blog about politics, you are probably trying to attract, primarily, people who are passionate about politics or certain issues and who are news junkies.
The person who commented on LinkedIn was actually interested in being hired to write web content. In a situation like that, you are selling yourself and your skills. Your audience is the people responsible for web content and who can hire you.
Once you know your audience, you need to reach them. There are a lot of tools out there to help you find people to follow who meet certain characteristics. The theory is, if you follow people, a good percentage of them will follow you back. You can search the web for “Twitter gain followers” and similar queries to find some of these tools to help you find good follows in your target audience. Primarily, you’ll want to look for people whose bio includes the topics you care about and, especially, who tweet a fair amount about these topics.
(Note, I highly recommend against the practice of following hundreds or thousands of people and then unfollowing the ones who don’t follow you back. It’s not well regarded by Twitter users, isn’t particularly effective as far as I can tell, and Twitter is cracking down on users who do that.)
Provide valuable information to your audience
The key way that you obtain and RETAIN followers on Twitter, though, is to provide information of value to them. So, you need to look at your target audience, the people you want to attract, and ask yourself “what information is of interest to them, and preferably also relevant to my blog.”
That’s what you want to tweet about.
Again, if you blog about wine and want to attract people who love wine, then tweet about wine! Tweet links to reviews and articles about wine, tweet about good wine-food pairings, tweet about happenings in the wine industry, the health benefits of wine, and so on.
For the person who commented and was looking to get hired to write web content, I’d suggest tweeting (and blogging) about writing good content: how to come up with headlines, how to develop content that interests users, directories to list sites/blogs in, matching SEO needs with copy, etc. Use your Twitter account to demonstrate your expertise and to pass on information of use to your target audience.
If I’m getting valuable information from your tweets, I’m likely to keep following you. I’m likely to retweet your tweets—which is key to viral spread of your content. I’m likely to recommend that others follow you. And I’m more likely to read your blog.
After you know what you need to tweet about, plan to tweet daily. Make no more than 1/3 of your tweets promotional (promoting your latest posts, your blog, your job search, etc.). Make no more than 1/3 mundane, personal tweets (“At the store.” “ZeeZee’s cheesecake, yum.”). Make 1/3 or more of your tweets RTs, replies to people, and tweets of interesting links.
Some people recommend an even lower ration of promotional tweets. And people’s opinions vary greatly on how much you should tweet about the day to day. But certainly don’t exceed 1/3 promotional.
Reach your audience through hash tags and follows
Make SURE that you include relevant hash tags in your tweets. If you blog and tweet about marketing, find the hash tags that people use when tweeting and searching on marketing, like #marketing #SEM, etc. Make sure you include those hash tags in your tweets so that others can find them in searches.
Also, once you’re clear on your audience, do searches using the hash tags and keywords you’ve identified. Use these searches to find other twitterers who regularly tweet on your topic. Look for both the big guys (with a thousand plus followers) and especially the smaller guys, like me, with followers only in the hundreds. Follow those people. They are part of your audience. The smaller ones are also the people who are most likely to read and retweet your content. Interact with them where appropriate, responding to questions or comments and retweeting their content when it’s good.
Promote your blog
Finally, promote your blog. That was the original goal, right? When you do promote, make sure your tweet uses a catchy, but accurate headline for your blog post, with a bit.ly link to the post. You can tweet about the same blog post for a few days, two or three throughout the day, as long as you don’t exceed the 1/3 rule.
There is a lot more you can do to promote your blog and go deeper with Twitter. But this will give you a good start. Oh, and (shameless plug) keep TweetPackage.com in mind for future promotions. We’re currently the only ones who can create packages, but we’ll be enabling you to create them soon. They are another way to get your target audience to follow you on Twitter. See Marketing with Packages
for more information, and sign up for notification if you want to try creating Tweet Packages.
Should Twitter Cater to Bloggers?
August 25th, 2009Watch the links flowing in the Twitter stream. Click a few. You’ll probably find that 80% of them lead to blogs.
Some are the sites of professional bloggers or online media giants. Others are the blogs of businesses large and small. But most of the links go to blogs or articles.
Blogs are essential to business people trying to promote their companies. They are, of course, essential to the bloggers making a living off their writing. Blogs or articles are essential to the many media and research companies on the web. And they are highly valuable to Twitter.
Many of the tweets are headlines or teasers for blog posts followed by links to the post.When people search Twitter for information, a lot of it comes back in the form of these links. When people surf the stream, they scan for interesting headlines from interesting tweeters.
In fact, the ability to create a good headline is put to use daily by Twitter users, giving bloggers a distinct advantage. Especially those keeping within about 130 characters (to allow for retweets).
Twitter is making its mark in large part as a conveyer of information, a huge real-time information resource. And blogs appear to be the link currency of Twitter.
So, if bloggers and their links are such a commodity for Twitter, perhaps it should cater more to bloggers?
Twitter may want to consider adding features that help bloggers and make it an even more attractive platform for them to promote their content. Here are some of the features I can think of:
Link Previews
One of the challenges with Twitter is the volume of tweets. One relies on the text in the tweet to decide whether the link is worth clicking on.
I’m disappointed too often because the tweet text is either purposefully deceptive or just not clear or accurate enough. I click on the link and the article is not what I expected or wanted.
On the flip side, I often wonder how many good posts I’ve passed up because the “headline” in the tweet wasn’t accurate or enticing enough. I only have so much time to surf the stream, after all. I can’t click on every link.
You may have encountered the double underline links used on some sites. When your cursor passes over them, a small window containing graphics and text pops-up over the page.
Often, these are ads, which I detest. Even when they’re not ads, I usually find these pop-ups rather annoying. But on Twitter, I think they could actually be useful.
If they popped up over links, you could get a better sense of where the link is taking you and decide whether to click it. That’s a useful feature for bloggers. Instead of losing people who’ve gotten click-shy, bloggers have a better chance of getting click-thru’s from their target audience.
Tracking Links through RTs
As a blogger, of course you want your promotional tweets retweeted.
But you probably track the links through bit.ly or another tool, to see how often they are being retweeted. Unfortunately, a lot of the other Twitter users want to track the items they retweet, so, they change the URL.
It would be great if Twitter provided a URL shortner in their UI and if it tracked these changed URLs, so bloggers (and others) could do accurate accounting.
Helping Bloggers Get More Regular Followers
Twitter is great for bloggers because we get to promote our headlines to our regular readers as well as promote it to potential new readers.
With the power of retweets and the fact that we get follows coming directly through Twitter rather than our blog, we have broader reach. Twitter could aid us by helping to make users aware of their own proclivities.
Users surf the stream, retweet this, click on this link or that link. They may notice that they’ve clicked several of a given person’s links or retweeted their stuff several times, but then again, they may not.
What if Twitter, unobtrusively, pointed out the fact that we seem to really like a given person’s tweets. Maybe it put little flags next to people we’ve clicked or RTed more than a certain amount. Or maintained a list in the right pane of the people whose links we’ve clicked but whom we’re not following yet.
That makes it easier for people to see new people they should be following. (And, of course, the more followers we get, the more opportunity for them to see the headlines for our posts.)
Those are a few of the features I can think of that Twitter could add to help bloggers. Can you think of others? Do you agree that bloggers are a special and especially important resource for Twitter, and should be catered to?
