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Twitter Marketing for Content Writers: First Step Strategy



Twitter yields a potential of 145 million active daily users. With creativity and vigilance flocks of free birdies can turn followers, turn to click traffic on the link to your portfolio resting in you Twitter bio, hint, turn active readership. In 2020 online, even offline, writing can be broken into five Ps: plan, pen, publish, promote and participate. We're here for the last two.

Done well, Twitter can arguably be the only social platform a writer needs. In this series, we'll look at considerations and methods both to drive traffic to your work from Twitter and to get your writing posted on Twitter.

1. Think before you Tweet

Key(board)pad, two hundred and eighty character limit, go! Simple. Let me know how that goes for you. My work here is done. What's new on Netflix?

Hm? Disappeared into the gaping abyss of the Twittersphere? That one tweet hasn't immediately elevated you to the sardonic status of Twitter-relative James Blunt stardom? Shocking.

Decide who you're talking to and where

Who are you tweeting? Know your target audience. Understand their needs, what they're seeking from the accounts they already follow, their points of view and where they're in discussion. 

Post to that discussion, use the hashtags your audience is using, follow those accounts and keep an open eye for opportunities to post your work and slash or promote your voice. Cater, entertain, present information and respond (regularly) to your audience as much with your tweets as you do your written works.

Get your audience's attention

How are you going to spike the heat under your audience's collar? Twitter is where Tweety birds disrupt the status quo not duck from controversy. Whatever you tweet, don't make it forgettable. Be provocative. 

I do not care about the disruption on TFL this morning unless you are @ing TFL in the manner of a witty wordsmith cutting keenly though indirectly to some socioeconomic point on privatisation of public transport systems which summons the revolutionist in me. You've two hundred and eighty characters, you're supposed to be a writer, use them well.

On that note, to make things trickier for you, short tweets, under 100 characters get a 21% higher interaction rate. Twenty-one percent is huge. Good luck with that.

Short can be sweet, bitter, but make it memorable

I'm not that mean. Try short snippets with a pigheaded tolerance, if not all out drive, for contextual vagueness. It works. 

Quotes from the work you're linking to are 54% more likely to get retweeted and call to actions have a personal impact and immediacy which works well under a hundred characters. 


Questions allow your followers to engage in your writing process, get their voice heard and naturally spark curiosity. When faced with a question we reflexively begin to answer it.

For example, don't think of an elephant. Did you picture an elephant? Even a cigarette burn of an elephant? The outline of an elephant? What colour is an elephant? You've definitely pictured an elephant by now. Response is an instinct, information digestion is not.

#hashtag?

Consider your hashtags and limit how many you use. This is not the naughties, no one wants to see a paragraph of blue hyperlink. Hashtags can promote a product i.e. a web page, a book, an article, etc. whereby you write the hashtag for the product anticipating and encouraging others to use the same in a form of hashtag branding. Alternatively they can be topic-specific which gets your tweet seen by other Twitter users searching for the same topics.


No!

The time to tweet is not yet upon us. Now with a vague idea of who and how see part two for social media copywriting and marketing personas to professionally promote your work and entice your audience.