Bloggiesta Mini Challenge: Twitter & Your Blog

This year I am hosting a Bloggiesta mini-challenge.  To start though I want to share a little about how Twitter can help you promote your blog!

Twitter is a fabulous resource for bloggers. I can’t tell you how many people have discovered my blog through Twitter. It opens your blog up to a whole new audience and it’s something that I think every blogger should use.

First things first: your account should be for your blog. You should be able to tell from the user name, avatar, and profile description that the person behind the Twitter is a blogger. I have my avatar as my blog button, my username is katiesbookblog, and my profile states: college student and young adult book blogger. You don’t need to share any more information than that. You can certainly have a personal Twitter too but if you want to interact with authors and publishers on Twitter, you need to make it easy for them to recognize you.

What should you tweet about? I use Twitter to interact with my readers. I love seeing what others are reading, what books they are excited about, really anything book related. I also use it to promote any posts that are on my blog. I use dlvr.it to automatically post links to all my blog posts on Twitter as soon as they go live on the blog. That one tweet gets quite a few people back to my blog and I don’t have to do anything except set my feed up with dlvr.it once. It’s a very nice feature and you can also set it up to link on your Facebook profile or fan page.

How to get followers? Twitter is no fun if nobody is reading what you have to say. I can personally vouch for that. Followers on Twitter make everything better, just like blog followers. Getting followers on Twitter is actually much easier than you would think. Tweet people and respond to something they said and they will most likely respond back. I can’t say that always works with publishers because they get quite a few tweets but it’s a great way to start interacting with fellow bloggers. Just make sure to consistently post something on Twitter and post something relevant. You don’t need to post everything you do to Twitter but it is a good way to get things out there without having to do a whole blog post.

What is right and wrong to post on Twitter? It is perfectly okay to post a little rant on Twitter every now and then. What is not okay is to name names when you are ranting about someone in particular. If your Twitter is going to be connected to your blog, you have to act professional. If you don’t get a book you want, you can’t call out the publisher on Twitter. If another blogger does something that makes you mad you can’t say: Oh, so and so, is such a crappy blogger, etc. Your blog is your business and your followers are a lot of the time like your coworkers and bosses. You don’t want publishers to see you act like that and you don’t want other bloggers to see it either. Just act professional and you will be fine!

So for the challenge:

I want you guys to use dlvr.it and set your blog posts to automatically post to Twitter.

1. Go to dlvr.it and create a login and password.

2. Once signed in, add your feed where it says sources.  Your feed is usually something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURBLOGNAME

3. Add your Twitter account where it says Destinations and select Post Title and Post Link under the Post Content tab.

4.  That’s it!  You are good to go!

If you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments, tweet me with them (@katiesbookblog) or email them to me (katieb206@gmail.com).  Happy bloggiesta!

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49 comments

  1. HOOOLLYYY COOWWW!!! You just helped me know one thing off my list! Yipppiee!! I’m at work doing the happy dance. Thank you so much because I was racking my brain on how to do this. THANK YOU!!!! oxox

  2. This is so helpful because I’m so weird with Twitter! I know how to use it personally but not as a book blog. Thanks so much for this post. I’m using dlvr.it right now. 🙂

  3. I don’t use Twitter much anymore – less time, but I do have my posts automatically post there (I use TwitterFeed). Also Tweetdeck is great for scheduling posts to repeat too.

  4. I have my blog posts set to post automatically to Twitter (@baystateRA) already, and it’s great. I also love having Twitter followers count as blog followers on my blog. Makes my follower stats look so much better!

  5. Both of my blogs are already connected to twitter and the posts appear automatically. I do use another program for that but it does the trick fine 🙂 Thanks for the challenge 🙂

  6. I love Twitter! It’s a great way to connect with authors and fellow bloggers, love how we can all chat about books and other random things over there. WordPress has an option to automatically connect blogs to Twitter and I’ve taken advantage of that function back when I first started. 🙂

  7. I heard there were multiple options to automatically post your feeds on twitter and facebook but never knew where. Dlvr.it works fine so it seems so glad I found it trough you 😀

  8. I didn’t know this existed. I tried using a plug-in on WordPress that was meant to post my posts to Twitter, but it never worked so I’ve been manually posting to Twitter.

    This is so much easier. Thanks for sharing.

  9. Thanks for the post. I actually have another service that already delivers the blog post links to my Twitter feed, so I won’t be going with this one … but for those who didn’t already have it set up, it’s good! Anyways, I did some tidying up of my social networking sites (including my Twitter profile) because of this post, so it was successful in ways you didn’t even intend. 🙂

  10. This is going to be sooo helpful! I always forget to link posts to the page’s facebook page but now it will do it all for me!!
    Thank you so, so, much!

    Set it up on both twitter and facebook. Now to just sit back and watch the show, right? 😀

  11. Thanks Katie! I syndicate with Networked Blogs, but I wanted to give this a shot, too. Created an account. It’s good to know this app is available.

    Zara D. Garcia-Alvarez

  12. It’s a very good idea to get your link on Twitter automatically. I’m on WordPress and there is a setting so it automatically posts the link to Twitter and Facebook.

    Very handy!

  13. Ooh, I just did this after reading about dlvr.it in the comments on somebody else’s blog. Fingers crossed it’ll work! 🙂

  14. WordPress.com has a button under settings so it is very easy to automatically send posts to Twitter.

    Also, I would like to suggest that people put a quick easy way to Tweet from a person’s blog – it makes cheering for Readathon and blogger-community events like this so much easier!

    Happy Bloggiesta-ing.

  15. Oh! I just did it! Thanks! I usually just go to bitly and do it because I like to add a little something after the title, but this is nice too for that first tweet, especially for when I have scheduled posts that go off at random times. Thanks!

  16. I’ve been using my Twitter for a couple of years for blog updates but been doing it manually. Thanks for pointing me to dlvr.it!

  17. I dont use Twitter a whole lot, mainly becuase I do not have time. I use wordpress.com and do have it set up through there that my posts go directly to Twitter. I pop in a few times a week for a few minutes just to see whats up 🙂

    Thsi weekend however… yeah, I have been on it for HOURS with Bloggiesta 🙂

    Thanks for the challenge!

    1. Click add destination, click on Add A Facebook account, log in to your Facebook to authorize it, and then it should have a drop down that lets you select where you want the links to go, your account or your fan page. Hope that works for you!

  18. I use Networked Blogs, but my Blog is syndicated to post all my posts to Twitter & the FB Fan Page for the blog 🙂 (I didn’t even realize it worked with Twitter)

    Thanks for the challenge! It made me check to make sure NB was actually working 🙂

    Jessica @ The Midnight Bookworm

  19. This was actually quite easy and I like not having to ‘do it’ manually now 🙂
    I’ve been thinking on opening an account only for my blog, since I kind of tend to go Bi-lingual and curse a bit on my twitter since it my persona account, but I never thought on what you mention about it contributing to the image of my blog.

    Thanks for that! 🙂

    Gave me lots to think about.

  20. I love using Twitter for my blog … I have a separate Twitter account for my music profile and it gets sorely neglected. I find I get way more traffic with my blog! And with WordPress, I’m able to send each of my posts to Twitter the instant they’re posted. It’s also set up to send to Facebook, which is great.

    I love your point about making your Twitter account reflect your blog … I think that’s so important, to have a certain look so people recognize you wherever you are. I like to think I’m carrying the same image to whatever social media platform I’m using.

    Awesome post!

  21. I did it!!!! Woohoo!!

    All this time I’ve been manually tweeting and FBing my posts, forgetting to, re-doing them, remembering in the middle of the night that I hadn’t, yet, etc, etc. 🙂 PHEW!!

    This was easy to set up!! Thanks!!

  22. Love the tips on how to have a professional Twitter account. It’s awesome for blogs, but it’s valid for all professions. Authors have to make it clear as well.