Music Promotion & Marketing

Using Twitter to Tweet Links More Effectively

Posted on September 7th, 2009 in Music Promotion & Marketing, Online Marketing & Promotion, Social Media, Twitter.
Tags: effective twitter marketing, posting links, tweeting links, Twitter

Posting links to Twitter can be a bit of a minefield, particularly when you want people to follow them and stick around a little. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Well, it’s about building up a sense of trust and a relationship between yourself and your followers. Once you’ve established that your followers will be much more inclined to follow your links. But how can you build up enough trust for people to jump on your links as soon as your post them?

The main key point here really is to not spam your Twitter followers with constant links back to your website. Self-promotion is okay every now and then, but that’s not to say people will appreciate every link going back to your website. That typically makes you a ‘spammer’ and is likely to lose you followers, rather than get any amount of traffic to your website. It may even affect your reputation and online presence so it really isn’t worth going down that road.

Instead, here are some suggestions for your upcoming posts:

Link to your website(s) – Maybe you’ve just posted a new blog article. You might want to know what people think. Well, link it up – no problem. But also be sure to try to express an interest in your followers’ thoughts on the topic. Essentially, the more you’re followers feel like their opinion matters to you, the more interested they’ll be in what you have to offer them.

Link to other websites – Have you found something interesting somewhere on the net? There’s no harm in sharing it along with your thoughts. If you’ve found some valuable content to share, you’re followers will start looking to you for exciting news and useful information.

Retweet links posted by the people you follow. You want your followers to know that what they have to say is valuable too – and more importantly – that you’re paying attention to it. If someone posts something interesting, spread the love. Your followers will appreciate the attention.

Don’t tweet a link without any context. This is a huge Twitter foul. A single link with no introduction or surrounding text wastes your followers time and probably makes them a bit hesitant about clicking. They don’t know what they are clicking, where they’ll end up and more importantly – do they even care in the first place?

So, we’ve established that spamming is not good practice. From research it seems that the value of Twitter is in the relationships that you can maintain, not the sheer number of followers you can achieve.

A great source for finding new people to follow on Twitter is WeFollow, a user-powered, tag-based Twitter user directory. WeFollow allows you to tag your Twitter account with three tags that represent you – say ‘blogger’, ‘tech’, and ‘web’, so that other users with similar interests can easily find you.

So, your goal now is to build up that trust and relationship and then maintain it by posting good tweets with useful information in a user friendly way. Then you may be forgiven for the odd self-serving link directly to your website.