Why Twitter at all?

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A couple of months ago I didn’t know what Twitter was and hadn’t a clue how much I’d be using it to interact with people and keep connected with many other bloggers.  Now, I’m not going to explain what twitter is as I’d be here until next week writing short of a few thousand words on the matter and I don’t like boring people, even at the best of times – rather, I’d prefer to send you to a resource that is well written and shows you exactly what you can do with twitter and how it can be used as another social tool to grow your reader base and your interaction with the blogging community.  Take a look over at Caroline Middlebrook’s blog and look at the Big Juicy Twitter Guide.

 

Watching what others are doing

I love to know what people (whether A-listers or other upcoming bloggers) are up to and what they’re surfing.  I use twitter fox and twitter bar – both add ons for firefox – to both keep uptodate with what others are viewing and reading (twitterfox) and post tweets to others that follow me as well as let them know of certain pages that I’ve just viewed that I thought were great to quickly show others in a tweet, but would be not really worth blogging about.  New stories and interesting blog posts are tweeted about on a daily basis, as well as some really funny pictures and interesting news in a whole variety of niches.

 

Updating people of some great stuff

Now, to me, my tweets are personal and things I’m doing at the current moment in time.  If I’d just had a 3 hour stint on writing content for a few niche blogs, or I’d been to Tesco and found some great ideas for products or niches, then that would be what I’d tweet to people.  Twitter to me is a mini update of what’s going on with me and my internet presence, not necessarily in depth, but it could be some pages I’m interested in at that time.

 

Networking gone mad

Now say I find a really great blog post on blogging, or on another niche topic.  I could stumble it and bookmark it on delicious, but I can also tweet about where I’ve just been and make a comment about what I saw/read.  I also could let people know I’ll be in a certain bar or cafe to meet up if they want to (not sure why anyone would want to meet up in rainy old Accrington though ;-).  I see so many communication back and forth with bloggers asking other bloggers what they’re doing and where they’re going, especially when there’s a conference on!

 

Three Twools I use

 

Twitter Fox

There’s a few main reasons why I don’t visit twitter directly and type in my tweet and press submit (see below).  Being quick about things and shaving even a few seconds off a task (making sure it’s done right of course) is always a habit for me, so, using twitter fox allows me to click, write, click – it’s that simple – open it up and write a tweet to everyone who is following me.

 

Twitter Bar

An additional tool that I use to post to twitter alongside twitterfox.  I usually use this if I’m browsing a webpage page and want to let people who follow me know that I’m viewing a certain page and that they should go and take a look for themselves. 

So, above is the page I’ve been viewing and after the ‘-‘ is my comment on the video I’ve been watching – I push the green button on the right and ‘hey presto’ it send the information I typed to my twitter account – fast and easy.

 

Twitterfeed.com

The third tool I choose to promote my blogs on twitter is twitterfeed.com.  I basically took 5 or so minutes to set up the account and made sure they have my RSS feed address for the tweets, and you sit back and relax.  When you publish a post to your blog, then twitterfeed will post a note in your twitter account that you have a new post – you can customise a little message like I have for each of your blogs, e.g. ‘new post from Road2blogging’, and it puts a link directly to the post page on your blog.

I find twitterfeed is really good if other bloggers have this tool too, as I am updated when they’ve posted some new content on their blog, and sometimes I don’;t check my RSS feed for a few days, I may take a look because the title intreges me.  So, using twitter feed could bring your RSS readers back to your blog?  Maybe.

 

 

Come follow me

I do tend to use twitter everyday and I also use twitterfeed.com to post out ‘tweets’ on my latest posts on this blog.  I follow around 30, what I consider really good bloggers, and check updates at least a few times a day.  It’s all about networking and having the information on what other are doing, so, if you have a twitter account, then why not come join and follow me?

So why do you twitter? It would be interesting to find out why you like, or dislike using twitter.

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