If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, it’s populated by dozens of RTs, or re-tweets. If I see a particularly good tweet, I will RT them to my followers and so on and so on. It’s the 21st century version of passing notes in class without the humiliation of getting busted by your scowling 6th grade teacher. Re-tweets are a real gold mine when it comes to article marketing. RTs usually consist of links to articles published elsewhere or tweets published by another Twitter user. Depending on the number of folks who read your RTs, this is potentially a click-and-link jackpot. So what makes an article re-tweetable and how can we use Twitter to help market our own articles?
Scan your favorite blogs and look for how many times it’s been re-tweeted. Timely, newsworthy stories tend garner the most RTs, followed by funny, unique and informative articles that are great reads. Don’t worries if your articles aren’t about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding or the story of the moment. There are other avenues. How-to pieces seem to have everlasting RT life. Web junkies young and old are forever looking for instructions or hints. For example, I wrote a piece in 2008 about tipping at restaurants that still gets comments and RTs. Articles can live forever if the content is well-written and packaged for mass audiences.
However, there is no accounting for taste (ahem). I have written pieces that seem destined for RT fame only to find they’ve only been pimped once or twice during their lonely lifespan online while, other pieces that were frankly a snooze to write have been re-tweeted far beyond my expectations. So were some of the pieces better than others? Did the site they were posted on experience a lull in traffic? Who knows, and better yet, who cares? With article marketing, the publishing has to be constant so if the prior one didn’t catch fire, there’s always another one coming down the pike. Twitter really helps out in this arena. Don’t be shy about re-tweeting your company articles and blogs to your followers. Shameless? Perhaps, but everybody else on Twitter is doing it, too. RTs help market articles to your followers and target audience without any middlemen. In other words: write, re-tweet and repeat.
Article marketing seems to be more fun and less mysterious using RTs and Twitter. Regularly practiced, RTs can open up our business and articles to readers that traditional marketing may have missed. So, Brandsplat readers, tell us the truth: Do you read RTs or do you pass? Any article marketing tips that you’d care to pass on to rest of us? Let’s hear it in the comments section!
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