Pull’s Social Media Specialist Dija Mulla is also a creative writer in her spare time. Dija has a personal blog which is where she writes short stories.
In this blog Dija explains how the thoughtful use of hashtags can lead to strong increases in Twitter follows:
Earlier this year I had a creative splurge and wrote a few short stories in quick succession. My blog however, wasn’t getting that much traffic. And if you ask any wannabe writer, one of the most satisfying things about writing fiction is to know that people have read and enjoyed your story.
So being the Social Media Specialist at Pull, I thought, there must be something I can do to bump up the views – and also as a challenge to myself, I wanted to see how well I could use social media for personal marketing.
And so I began.
My aims were to:
- Increase traffic to my blog
- Raise my profile as a writer
- Target other writers and their followers
I picked Twitter as my channel, because it’s more public (and I was already annoying my Facebook friends with my constant blog plugs!).
My followers on Twitter were a mix of my friends and work colleagues and they’d already read my stories and anyway I wanted to widen my readership.
So the first thing I did was find the most popular hashtags related to writing. I used a tool called hashtagify:
I then searched for tweets with the hashtag #amwriting and started engaging with those tweeters who I concluded were mainly writers themselves.
I favourited (or liked as it’s now called) and commented on the relevant tweets – doing this got the writers’ attention and the attention of their followers.
And as a result I saw a bump in people following me and people engaging with my Twitter profile.
Feeling a lot more confident, I started tweeting my own short stories using the #amwriting hashtag:
My traffic started to increase along with engagement on my tweets. Likes and comments on my blog post were also increasing. People were also spending more time on my blog reading more of my stories.
Twitter was becoming the top referrer for my blog
I also saw an increase in organic traffic – people were starting to search for my stories by the name of the story:
And 2015 became my best year yet!
And now even though I haven’t posted a short story in a while – or tweeted as often, I still get a steady stream of traffic to my blog:
Learnings you can take away for your own blog:
- Engagement is key: find relevant people and their tweets and like their tweets, retweet them, comment on them – everyone loves getting more engagement on their tweets
- Getting your name out there on Twitter could help raise your profile and people may end up searching your blog posts by name – I guess related to this point is having good content – or at least content that your Twitter audience will love and want to read again
- Consistent engagement will keep boosting your profile: keep engaging with relevant people especially influencers in your blog’s industry – show genuine interest in their content, even after you’ve raised your own profile – you need to keep your name current and part of the industry chatter
The most important lesson I came away with is:
You’re never just limited to your Twitter followers – getting involved in industry conversations can help you widen your reach a lot more than just tweeting to the same old people.
Read next: NEW Facebook features that make your marketing more effective
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Posted 27 November 2015 by