Why Tweet?

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Because tweeting, if not just as personal tweets, gives us a platform, an audience, not just to relay what we are doing, but also what we are thinking, to more than just our friends, family and acquaintances. They give us a chance to interact with a broader spectrum of people, and extend our personal interfaces, beyond our current, immediate personal neighbourhood.

Keeping up relationships by sharing events in our lives is best played out at Facebook and the like. Telling the world what we think, and connecting with people we do not know, but that have a similar interest or goal, is much better undertaken on Twitter, with succinct tweets that can be multiplied and made more powerful by the simple means of a retweet.

Why you might want just followers I do not know, unless you are a shepherd. But there are many Tweeps that seem to think that there is some sort of social kudos having myriads of followers. They follow others just to get them to follow back, and when that does not happen, they unfollow. I can't think of a more wasteful use of time than that - well I can, but it has nothing to do with Twitter.

Twitter to me is a place to gain followers who are interested in what I have to say, what I have available for them, and who, on occasion interact with their followers by retweeting a tweet of mine. Both in reciprocation, and where I find that I am interested in the tweets that a tweep makes, I follow, and retweet, where appropriate for me and my audience.

Followers are an audience that pay by receiving into their lives what I consider to be of relevance to those that had enough interest in what I have to say, to become followers. Following to gain followers yourself is a futile exercise, as many that follow back have no interest in what is tweeted.

If you want followers, then tweet something that will be of interest to them.

Twitter is a great place to promote your product, and keep your customers / audience up to date with what is going on in your business world. What I also know, is that the majority of your followers will lose sight of your tweets in the noise of all the other tweets that they receive, especially if they follow many other tweeps. I also know that they will get bored with what you have to say, if all that you are saying is for your benefit alone, or about yourself (read "business" or "your articles" here).

So, by all means promote your business. Keep your customers updated. But also share relevant snippets of information that are related to your business (like tweeting articles that you find that might also be of interest to your followers).

Remember, keep it social. When a customer or client converses with you, it is not always related to your business. You try to encourage a relationship with them - do the same with your tweets.

The 140 characters available to you mean that "succinct" is the order of the day. Why some tweeps only tweet quotations I will never know. Why some tweeps only "RT @" beggars belief. Why some tweeps ....... you get the drift! 

If you want to express yourself, and 140 characters is sufficient for you so to do, then do it - express YOURSELF. Say what YOU are thinking, what YOU like or dislike, YOUR political opinions, YOUR take on life. And if 140 characters is not enough then start a blog, or come write on Wizzley, or Hubpages or wherever your fancy takes you.

One thing I would say is make your tweet readable for the majority of possible readers - not everyone has the time or inclination to decipher tweet-speak. Your voice could be lost in the noise generated by others.

So, you write articles. You want to make money. You have been told that if you write quality content the search engines will arrive, see what great quality of writing you have produced, and the algorithms are so good, as you are, that your articles will reach the top of the SERPs in no time flat - and you will make your fortune. Utter bull!

If you write articles on any free article site you are at the mercy of how well those sites optimize both the site and your offerings. Sure, you need to have undertaken your keyword research, your SEO, the research for your article, and it must be your work. But it will be to lesser avail if the writing site does things wrong - and if the site community is unwilling to pull together to get the best results for ALL.

Now, you are wondering what the hell I am talking about. Well I analyse everything. I do not believe anything anyone tells me in the world of on-line earnings without doing some background work myself. And, you may be asking - what has this got to do with the title of this article: Why Tweet? I'll get there, don't worry.

I wrote articles at Hubpages. It was a great site for writers because the search engine love that emanated from the site and attached itself to each hub, ensured the best chance for any article to get promoted in the SERPs, beyond it's merited position, in the quickest time. This changed with the Google 'Farmer' or 'Panda' update. This change was not due to the algorithm change, but rather as a result of a misguided change in the fundamental structure of Hubpages as a site.

Hubpages now no longer transfers the search engine love it gained as a site to each of the articles that are now produced. What was the change? They split the site into thousands of sub-domains: one for each writer account.

Why does this make so much difference? My evidence comes from Market Samurai - if you use this tool and have articles on Hubpages check the figures in these columns in the SEO Competition section: IC (Index Count - the number of pages on the site indexed by Google); RDD (Referring Domains - the number of unique domains that point to the site); BLD (Backlinks to the Domain).

All are relevant to all search engine ranking algorithms. Before Hubpages changed to sub-domains all three of these parameters outranked most other sites with whom an article writer would be contending - almost as good as Wikipedia. Since the change, the numbers are purely those that relate to your sub-domain - unless you promote to extraordinary lengths, all the search engine love has disappeared.

So, what about Wizzley? They do not have sub-domains. What does that mean to an article writer? Well, we get all of the search engine love for the whole Wizzley domain attached to each of the parameters mentioned above. Great you say. I'll have a bit of that - my articles will hop to the top of the SERPs in no time.

Unfortunately, the writers at Wizzley have not done enough yet to achieve the levels of search engine love that Hubpages once enjoyed.

So what do we need to do to achieve the required goal?

Answer:

1. Write more articles
2. Promote the articles more vigorously
3. Tweet every one of them that we read, and write - the most important. (And 'like' and '+' and submit them to social bookmarking sites).

Tweeting articles written by other writers seems to be an anathema to many article writers. Perhaps it is a by-product of being told not to click on adverts. I don't know. What I do know is that Wizzley has made it easy to share, by placing the share buttons at the top and bottom of articles.

Tweeting and sharing other writers articles is good for them - you probably realized that one!

Tweeting and sharing them is also good for you, especially if you use #hashtags judiciously. Why? Because the tweet may attract followers that you might not otherwise have attracted - and they may just be the one that sends your own tweets viral.

It is also an essential element, tweeting other writers articles that is, in gaining backlinks to the Wizzley domain, that benefits all that write on the site (in increasing IC, RDD and BLD numbers). See Market Samurai figures for these numbers against any of your own Wizzley articles. They are already good, but to gain maximum benefit for all, they must get much better.

You would like to promote your own articles to gain back-links - but it is an arduous, and boring task. What you actually want to do is write. Well, write a tweet, and post it. Write some other tweets. Then tweet about your article again. Why? Because, in the meantime, you will have gained more followers who will not have seen the original tweet; and, the tweet will have gone out at a particular time when many of your followers will not have seen it - tweet it at a different time, each time. (This is not spamming - as long as you do not overdo it.

If you have an RSS feed use Twitterfeed or dlvr.it to autopost tweets for you. And you can autopost other authors RSS feeds - why not, there is no harm in it!

This is an essential task within your back-linking strategy.

But how do backlinks emanate from a tweet? (It is a good strategy to use #hashtags in tweets - within Twitterfeed also, as a prefix or suffix)

1. paper.li picks them up to create newspaper format pages (perhaps we can use #wizzle, #wizz, #wizzling, #wizzer, #wizzart, #wizzpop as hashtags and create a number of paper.li newspapers to increase backlinking opportunities for all Wizzley tweeters)
2. major on-line news sources (such as Huffington Post) point to articles linked to in tweets
3. twikle, favit, bubble.ly, twitiq, cheaptweet, twellow,  tweetmeme, twitaholic, twittweb, tweetbuzz, tweetmart, topsy, twend, followfriday and the like will also generate back-links
4. Other websites that scrape twitter will possibly pick up on your tweets

- all by posting simple tweets about articles on your Twitter account. And, don't forget, if the article you tweet is not your own, it can still have a beneficial effect on the overall standing of Wizzley, to the benefit of all authors at the site.

So that is: Why Tweet?