Colorado Green Real Estate

How to Make Your Blog Posts Viral in 3 Easy Steps Using Twitter

In a couple of previous articles, I’ve written about how to use HootSuite, my favorite Twitter client, to promote your website and your blog. The great thing about HootSuite is that you can track the statistics and see how many clicks your tweet generated.

In this article, I’ll outline how to embed a custom “Tweet This” button right in the body of your blog article. The benefit is that the reader now has the opportunity to become a promoter of your article by clicking the “Tweet This” button. You benefit from the added exposure with a tweet sent by the reader containing a link to your article.

There are three easy steps to follow. First, the assumption is that you have a Twitter account. If not, then you can set one up really easy. In my view, anyone interested in promoting their business should get on board with Twitter.

Step 1: Select a “Tweet This” button of your choice. There are lots out there too choose from. Here are a couple you can use or you can find another one you like. Just right click on the image and save it to your computer. Adjust the size if needed.You can also make your own.

Step 2: Insert the button image into your article in your preferred location. I like the image right up front so it isn’t missed, but you can put it anywhere you want.

Step 3: Create a link to the image within the AR editor or whatever editor you are using as follows:

http://twitter.com/home?status=article title and link

Article title=the title of your blog post or article.

Link=the link to your article or blog post.

Note: You'll need to post the article, quickly go out and grab the link from the outside blog and then come back and edit the article to insert the link.

You want to shrink the link so use your favorite link shrink tool. HootSuite, TweetDeck, or TinyURL.com will all work fine or you can use your own.

It’s okay to have spaces between the words in the title of your article and between your article and the link, but be sure the first letter in the string touches the equal sign.

Remember your article title and link must be less than or equal to 140 characters for Twitter.

And that’s it, you’re done!

You should test it once to be sure you haven’t missed a character or something. Once you get it down, you can quickly insert the ‘Tweet This’ button in all of your articles that you want the public to see.

The key is to customize the link for each article!

ActiveRain members: If you have an outside blog, be sure to grab the link for the subject article from there and not from AR. Otherwise, you’ll be driving traffic to your AR blog. Of course, that’s okay if that’s what you want.

The ‘Tweet This’ button gives all of us another way to support one another. If you see a ‘Tweet This’ button in a blog article you like, especially if you are leaving a comment, then click it. It only takes a couple of seconds to click the button and launch a tweet about the article to your Twitter followers. Everyone benefits!

I hope you find this useful. If so, please click the ‘Tweet This’ button at the beginning of the article ;-)

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Tweeting Can Be a Real Hoot With HootSuite

I’ll admit I’ve been slow to catch onto to social media, but I am now bitten by the bug. I started using Twitter back in the spring of this year. I bumbled along for a while feeling clumsy and awkward. I just couldn't seem to figure out how to use in a meaningful and intelligent way. I took a long break and then after several Tweet-less months I again succumbed to all the hype and jumped back on-board.

I now enjoy Twitter as a communication tool that is near real time and global. The key to make it an even more useful tool is to segment sending and receiving Tweets by subject and geography. That is true, at least for me, regardless if I am tweeting for business or personal.

Twitter hasn’t generated any leads so far but I am learning more about how to have fun with it while driving traffic to my website and blog (which is also quite new.) Actually, it doesn’t really matter if I generate any leads with Twitter. I’ve discovered some very useful information tweeting along the social media highway and frequently book marked some great resources. One in particular that I stumbled on called HootSuite I find quite remarkable.

Before HootSuite I was using Tweetdeck and I thought that was great. The ability to have several columns open and sorted, kind of, seemed incredible at the time. And that was barely a week ago. With HootSuite you can have multiple columns and multiple tabs which gives you many different ways to organize the sending and receiving of Tweets. It also handles multiple profiles and you can even schedule Tweets to be sent at a later time.

But the most powerful tool in HootSuite by far is called Hootlet. When you use the Hootlet tool to shrink a link and then to send a Tweet with that link the click-through statistics are collected. You can come back in just a very few minutes and see the number of clicks on the links in your tweet. You can even see what country the users are in. And of course, the best part of all is that it is free. I find that quite amazing.

I am having fun with Hootsuite and with Twitter while promoting sustainable real estate. I always take care to distribute quality information, not sales hype. I block and unfollow salesy Tweets without hesitation. I don’t like it and I assume other people don’t either.

Once this week, I had nearly 80 clicks on a mere 7-8 Tweets that only took a few minutes to initiate. I find that absolutely amazing. Of course, I am still amazed with telephones, televisions and airplanes.

I am curious how others may be using Twitter in their business.

Cheers,

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