Making Your Blog Post Twitter Worthy
Twitter is awesome. I love Twitter. I mean from a blogger stand point. Really, where would be we be without Twitter? We would be working the forums and guest posts even harder. Ok, that might not be such a bad thing.
Honestly, I get a lot of visits from people coming from Twitter. So I am going to let you in on my secrets. (Actually, they are not secrets, they are well-known tips that bloggers learn when you have been doing this gig for years. So when someone says they have a “secret”, call them on it.)
My Secret: I make my posts Twitter friendly.
What does that mean?
Make Titles Twitter Cool
When I write a title for my post I make sure it is only about 80 or less characters long. That way when someone shares it there is room for my Twitter handle. (I include my Twitter handle so I know when someone shares my post so I can thank them.)
If you click my share button to the left (go ahead click it, I dare you) a box pops up so you can share it on your Twitter account. I keep my title way shorter than 140 characters, which is the limit for a tweet.
As you can see from the highlighted number there is still 43 characters left to use.
Another reason to keep it way shorter than 140 characters is the retweet factor. We all hope our stuff gets shared. When someone shares something on Twitter and then another person shares that tweet again, it is called a retweet. Retweets tend to add characters to a tweet. They can get pretty long. So you still want your title to be intact. Keeping it less than 80 characters and you should be ok.
Also, at less than 80 characters you can catch people’s attention better. The less characters to catch someone’s eye the better. Long, drawn out titles on Twitter tend to be ignored, that is why Twitter keeps tweets to 140 characters. They know what they are doing over there at Twitter.
Eye Popping, Mouth Dropping Titles
Boring titles are made by the hundreds every hour of everyday online. Who wants to read a post title that screams “I didn’t care enough to write a decent title for my post so don’t bother reading any further.”
Change it up. Make your titles interesting and/or funny. Make it have a personality. Have it say something to your target audience. Make sure it stands out in the Twitter crowd.
What would you rather click on to read more?
“Having Fun with Your Cat”
Or
“Catnip: Can Kitty Find the Fun?”
I KNOW you hid the catnip in here!
This is when you need to know what problems and interests your target audience has. Cat lovers already know how to have fun with their cat. They know about catnip, but do they know they can have fun hiding catnip?
Another, more controversial way to bring attention to your title in a tweet is to be risky or at the least amusing.
“How to make coffee.”
Or
“Naked Coffee Making in the Kitchen” (No, you don’t need to be naked, the beans are naked.)
“Making Coffee to Give You a Morning Buzz”
That is not as risky as I have seen but you get my point.
Use Your Keywords
One of the best tricks, er, secrets, bloggers use to get posts noticed on Twitter is to be sure their main keywords are in the first 10-20 characters of the post.
“Coffee: Making the Elixir of the Gods”
The keywords there are “coffee” and “making”, the rest is just fluff. But the first few words tell the reader what the post is about.
I tend to use my keywords often in the beginning of a post:
The WAHM Affiliate: 2 Simple Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog
Set Up Your Site in a Week’s Worth of Naptimes
Creating Niche Sites: Online WAHM Opportunity
You do not need to do this with every post. For one, your readers would get bored with your title structure. And two, not every post needs attention on Twitter. We would like it that way but face it, not every post we write is a winner.