Market Your Mom Blog on Twitter

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

Twitter excels is as a tool to promote your personal brand. As Facebook has evolved, it has become more and more effective as a tool to promote your blog. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to have gotten slightly less effective for blog promotion. You certainly can promote your blog there, but to be most effective, it should be a smaller, unobtrusive part of your activity on Twitter.

Most people don’t like to follow folks who are only on Twitter to promote themselves. Yet Twitter’s members use their accounts in many different ways, and there are some that prefer to follow their favorite blogs or businesses via tweets instead of RSS feeds or on Facebook.

Follow this formula for building your personal brand on Twitter. It is broken down by the following percentages. This works great for most people using Twitter to promote themselves and their blogs at the same time:

10 percent self-promotion: This would include posting updates about and links to your websites or other projects you’re working on.
20 percent promoting others: This would include retweeting friends’ tweets, talking about friends’ projects, or posting links to content on their websites.
30 percent being a resource to the community: This would include answering questions, offering recommendations, posting links to content that will help your followers in some way and participating in conversations where you could add value.
40 percent conversational interactions that reinforce your personal brand: This would include talking about subjects and people that you want to be associated with, plus general conversations with friends.

If it’s a high priority to you to build your blog’s brand separately from your personal brand, create a separate account for promoting just your blog. While you can use this separate account to post links to your blog content, Twitter works best when people feel that they can interact with you a bit more personally. In this circumstance, adjust the preceding percentages as follows:

40 percent – 50 percent self-promotion: This would include posting updates about and links directly to your blog.
30 percent being a resource to the community: This would include answering questions, offering recommendations, posting links to content that will help your followers in some way and participating in conversations where you could add value.
20 percent – 30 percent conversational interactions that reinforce your personal brand: This would include responding to comments and starting conversations with your followers on topics related to their interests and your blog.

This is an ideal goal — and a formula you can’t always follow. It works best when you can be consistently active on Twitter. Adapt this model to ensure that you maintain both a personal and professional presence on Twitter while working to respect the way your followers want to engage with you and your content.

Balance the need to keep marketing tweets out of your personal relationships with a commitment to provide consistent links to new blog content for users who want that information. It’s more important to have an imperfect presence on Twitter than none at all.