Most of you reading this will already have a social media account where you send out details of your new blog posts. You may, however, decide to create a separate account for your blog related stuff – @bonjourblogger is obviously not a personal account, so here are a few things we’ve picked up in the last year and wanted to share.
The first thing to look at would be how to make the distinction between accounts. Depending on what you’re tweeting, you might want to avoid getting the accounts mixed up – we’ve found using totally different apps on the iPhone is a great help with this. (If you’re interested, we use Tweetbot for personal stuff – it’s amazing for muting stuff and looks good too – and the official Twitter app for @bonjourblogger – it gives you a little more information about who’s done what to your tweets which is pretty useful)
You’ll want to build up an audience on the new account, so make sure you’re following some of your favourite bloggers, and of course, take part in the regular blogger chats. One of the good things about having a separate account is that you won’t feel as guilty for tweeting so much in the hashtag chats! Build up relationships with new bloggers – it can be difficult if you’re working full time, but popping your head in a few times a day to your account and replying to tweets will help to get you seen.
Ways to build up those tweets and start conversations include current events that relate to your blog (perhaps articles in different publications you read – if you’re quite into technology, then articles from The Verge might be interesting to people) or talk about TV shows you love – although you might be live tweeting it on your personal account, asking questions about it can help to get people talking to you – and it’s something that you could schedule an hour or so before your lunch break so you have things to reply to when you have the time.
Try to avoid things like random inspiring quotes, being repetitive (which can be difficult, but just try to keep note of what you’ve said in the last few days – no one wants to see your latest five tweets being about a new blog post!) and ranting – what sort of impression would you want to give a new reader?
With @bonjourblogger, it would be difficult to be able to tweet out links to old posts all the time without some sort of automation. We’ve talked about Buffer before, but something that has really helped with this has been upgrading to the “Awesome” account (for $10/month (about £6)) and combining this with Bulk Buffer. Bulk Buffer is an external website to Buffer, which allows you to upload a CSV (comma separated variable file) with all your tweets on separate lines. This allows you to upload 250 new tweets/statuses at a time, which is ideal for us. We also have a spreadsheet in Google Docs, which has the details of all blog posts in there – titles, links,dates and a tweet to go with each one. By using IFTTT, this spreadsheet is updated with the first three pieces of information automatically when a new post is published – the empty spaces on the spreadsheet remind us to write the new status. Then, when the Buffer runs out of tweets to send, we just pull a random selection from this spreadsheet, put in a new CSV file, and upload.
You could also use something like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule specific tweets – if you’ve scheduled a post to go out at 12pm, then you could use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule another tweet to go out at 7pm to remind people to check out your latest post.
How do you deal with having a second Twitter account?
