What Does Twitter Have to Do With Blogging?
If you are a relative newbie to the world of blogging, you may or may not know much about Twitter. I tend to find that a lot of Twitterers are bloggers. I became kind of curious about the relationship between the two. Here are some of my thoughts about the Twitter/blogging connection.
- Bloggers are often told that Twitter is a good way to grow their blog readership. First of all, you can easily feed your blog to Twitter, so that each time you blog, your new post is announced as a Tweet. If discussion builds around either your post, or your tags, then you can quickly add a follower or two. Also, your website or blog is prominently displayed in your Twitter profile, so that your followers can find out about it if they stop in.
- Twitter is kind of an in-between-blog-posts vehicle for some people. Blogs are generally at least a couple of paragraphs long. You have something to say, and you take a few minutes (or in my case, occasionally a whole darn hour) to compose your thoughts and put them down in your blog. But what about when something comes to mind that you may not have time to write a whole post about, but you still want to share? You tweet it. 140 little characters of burning info that just can’t wait until the next post? You tweet it.
- Twitter is the ultimate networking tool. Whether or not we quite accept it, blogging is about building networks. But in most cases, network building for bloggers can take a long time. Network building on Twitter, however, is much faster, and there are multiple ways to push it forward even more quickly: TwittGroups has a seemingly unending list of ways to network with people of similar interests, backgrounds, work affiliations, geographic locations, etc. And building a network on Twitter is a highly effective way of getting new people to find out about your blog.
If you have a blog, or are thinking about starting a blog, you might want to give Twitter a chance. It is an effective jump-start for building blog traffic, and networking with other like-minded bloggers.
Until next time,
