Twitter Guide Part #7: Multiply Your Twitter Audience

The early sections of this guide taught you how to grow your audience of Twitter followers because without an audience, you are just talking to yourself. But let me show you the hidden power of Twitter that so many people don’t get… You don’t actually need direct followers to have an audience! You can leverage other existing networks.

Publicize Your Twitter RSS Feed

Did you know that your Twitter feed is also available as an RSS feed? Go your profile page and then scroll down to the bottom. There on the bottom left is a ‘RSS’ button. Click on it for the link. It looks something like this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7875772.rss

Because this is an RSS Feed, you can publicize it! First there were web directories, then article directories and now there are RSS directories too. Here is a massive list of RSS Directories that you can submit your feed to. Be careful though… if you tend to tweet mainly about what underwear you have on, don’t go submitting it to a medical directory. Use some common sense.

Twitter / Blogging Mashup

Do you have a blog? Many blogs have a large audience, there are more people that read blogs than people who use Twitter. First let me talk about a service called LoudTwitter. This will take all your tweets from one day, package them up into a blog post and publish it on your blog.

Why is this useful? Remember that Twitter is a real time application and people on the Internet are spread all over the world. I am based in the UK and yet most of my blogging and Internet marketing friends are based in the US or Australia. Many people watch Twitter while they are awake but not everybody will go back over their timeline from the night before.

By posting your tweets to your blog you can make sure that you’re readers don’t miss a thing. Of course you must be careful with this. I don’t use it because I tend to keep my blog strictly on-topic but I like to have a bit more fun with Twitter and I don’t necessarily feel that my blog audience would appreciate all my tweets.

Twitter Social Button

We have Digg buttons, Stumble buttons, Delicious buttons etc etc and now we have a Twitter button. TwitThis makes it very easy for your blog visitors to publicize your blog post via their Twitter feed. You can see an example at the bottom of this post.

Wordpress Plugins

Now if your blog audience and your Twitter audience match and you happen to have a Wordpress blog, then you can make use of some specific plugins that allow a more fluid integration.

Why would you want to do this? In a recent blog post I spoke about the benefits of untargeted traffic. Think about how much traffic you get on a daily basis that doesn’t hang around. If your latest blog post doesn’t grab their attention then perhaps your latest tweet will. That could net you some extra followers who might become blog readers further down the line.

Anwanore’s Widget - Allows you to post several of your latest tweets into your blog and you can put it anywhere by calling a php function from within your template. The author is working on future enhancements such as an optional avatar display.

Sidebar Widget - If your theme is widget-enabled then you might want to check out this plugin which allows you to create a highly customisable widget for the sidebar.

Twitter for Wordpress - Another plugin that creates a widget for you.

TwitterTools - This plugin by Alex King allows you to archive your tweets, make blog posts out of them, send tweets from your sidebar and lots more.

TwitTwoo - Twitter in your sidebar, AJAX style - so no reloading of the page is necessary. Very stylish and easily customisable from the options page.

Third Party Twitter Integration

If you’ve looked at some of the previous sections of this guide you’ll already have seen a whole bunch of third party tools that have been developed for Twitter. Some of these tools can be used to send out your tweets to audiences on other networks and the cool thing is that these people do not need to be directly following you on Twitter.

Integrating with Facebook

Twitter have developed a Facebook application that integrates your Twitter feed into your Facebook feed. This is only useful if you actually have friends on Facebook :-) If you don’t have many, you can start by adding me…

When you login to Facebook the first page you see is the news feed which displays selected news items from all of your friends.

With this application installed, your tweets appear in the news feeds of all your friends! Of course they only stay there for a certain amount of time until they get bumped off but still, this is exposure without direct followers and I think it’s pretty damn cool!

There is another Facebook application called TwitterSync that will actually cause your latest tweet to become your Facebook status. One thing to note - any links will be stripped down to plain text so don’t think you can get a load of backlinks with this!

So why is this app useful? Well it depends on your Facebook usage - I often forget to update my status so it doesn’t usually say anything. By using this app, it makes my Facebook status more interesting which can encourage people to check me out.

MyBlogLog

I don’t think that MyBlogLog has quite the support that it has enjoyed in the past but this is still somewhere else that you can propagate your Twitter feed to and of course once it’s setup, you don’t need to do anything.

Login to MyBlogLog and then click the ‘Edit Profile’ link from the green buttons on the right. From there click ‘Services’. It’s easy to miss this. From here you can link in your profiles from a ton of other networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and of course Twitter too.

Once you’ve incorporated your Twitter feed your latest tweet appears on your profile page underneath your avatar though I have found this to be a little buggy lately.

Jaiku, Pownce & Tumblr

Jaiku is the biggest competitor to Twitter and it has recently been acquired by Google so it will become an important platform. Pownce and Tumblr are also micro-blogging Twitter competitors. Now before you panic about having to choose between them all… relax!

HelloTxt is an aggregation service that allows you to post once through their interface and have that message propagated to all the major micro-blogging networks - Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and a few smaller ones as well. Of course the tricky bit is getting followers on all those other networks!

If you only use Twitter and Jaiku then another solution is TwitKu which provides an integrated interface to both networks.

Twitter Badges

So we’ve covered your blog, Facebook, MyBlogLog and other micro blogging platforms. But there’s more… There are lots of places in which you can own a little piece of the Internet - MySpace comes to mind.

Twitter have released support for official badges which you can customise in a number of ways. There are Flash and Javascript versions so wherever you put these needs to have support for those technologies.

How Twitter Promotion Can Go Viral

When something is publicized via Twitter it can sometimes go viral. For example, person A tweets about a site they are browsing and that goes out to their followers. One of those people picks it up, likes it, tweets it also but it now goes to a whole new groups of people and the effect goes on. Of course this will only happen if the content is tweet-worthy but it is much easier to twitter about a url than to link it in a blog post.

Let me try to explain this more clearly with this somewhat messy diagram:

So the first tweet comes from someone whose audience is the yellow group. Perhaps it is you promoting your latest blog post… all the people in the yellow group see it. One of those people likes it and also twitters it to their group - they are the red group. Suddenly your link has hit a whole new crowd. Now someone from the red group picks it up and tweets it and this goes out to the green group and so on.

The beauty of this effect is that it happens with absolutely no participation from you! All you need to do is attract twitter followers to your blog. Writing a Twitter guide helps :p Joking aside, I have seen a massive increase in the referral traffic from Twitter as this guide has been rolling out throughout the week.

For example, at the time of writing I have around 150 followers which is not a huge amount. However Ed Dale (who introduced me to Twitter) has 1684 followers so when he tweets about my guide (which he did, thanks Ed!) it goes out to a massive audience that is far larger than I could have reached on my own.

But it doesn’t stop there… Ed is Twitter-savvy and his tweets are automatically posted to his blog which has another large audience. You could argue that any form of link bait can have the same effect. True, but there is one vital difference - link bait requires that people have the ability to link. They need to run a website or blog etc, they need to get out their editing software, write a post etc etc. That’s a lot of effort. But with Twitter, 2 seconds and you’re done. It’s just so damn easy to Twitter-promote something!

Summary of the Twitter Guide

This has been a long guide, not everybody will read it. Let me sum up what I think are the benefits of Twitter and what you can do with it:

• Twitter is mobile - instant communication, any time, anywhere
• Twitter enforces your chosen brand in a non-selling way
• A ton of tools allow you to send / receive tweets any way you want to
• Twitter can be propagated far and wide, further than just your followers
• Twitter can be a source of up-to-the-minute information
• Twitter is fun!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the guide. Note that this is a work in progress. I subscribe to all sorts of Twitter related blogs and alerts so I can keep myself up to date and I shall be updating the guide regularly. Please leave feedback on the discussion post and don’t forget to bookmark it, stumble it and anything else -it, you can think of :-)

This post is just one part of the larger Big Juicy Twitter Guide. There is reader discussion post and you might also want to follow Caroline on Twitter.

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