One of the ancillary benefits to keeping a community is I can conduct\u00a0experiments\u00a0and share results with you here (I can\u2019t do that with client communities directly for obvious reasons).\u00a0If you have a community and aren\u2019t conducting\u00a0experiments\u00a0with them, consider making them a regular part of your interactions. It\u2019s a great way to learn.<\/p>\n
Today I wanted to talk about syndicating your blog into Twitter and share results from a quick experiemnt I conducted last month.<\/p>\n
Before I get into it: if you are blogging on a domain other than YourName.com, you should register your blog brand name on Twitter. Then automate syndication of your blog\u2019s content there. It\u2019s easy and just takes a second.<\/p>\n
Most big name blogs already do this, but even if you have a smaller blog it still makes sense to meet community expectation by offering links to content in multiple platforms under the brand name.<\/p>\n
I registered\u00a0@TheFutureBuzz\u00a0on Twitter awhile ago to protect this site\u2019s name and also because I noticed people Tweeting at a non-existing account. A few people organically followed it just because it was created, but I was curious what would happen if I flipped all the subscribe and share hooks on this site to tag to the brand handle instead of mine (@AdamSinger). So I switched all the links last month.<\/p>\n
Thinking about it since then \u2013 it just makes sense. The focus isn\u2019t to grow my own name, rather to grow the brand of The Future Buzz. That\u2019s because I plan to iterate this site to be even more community-focused in the next version. Right now the community is brought into the mix through\u00a0guest\u00a0posts, comments and the fact that I feed back the\u00a0community responses\u00a0to subscribers. But I\u2019d like to encourage increased sharing of ideas from readers with each other in addition to comments. That\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n
Back to web brands. My sense is that a brand of media has a more powerful position on the web (and in the world) if the name has lots of brand awareness,\u00a0social proofing\u00a0and is\u00a0trusted. The people behind it support that too, of course, but the media brand can become even bigger than the people producing content.<\/p>\n
So on to the\u00a0experiment\u00a0results: will less people opt-in because it\u2019s just a feed in Twitter?<\/strong><\/p>\n The answer is no, so long as the content is still useful and followers enjoy receiving the links in their stream. It can even be\u00a0more<\/em>\u00a0attractive to opt-in to for those who don\u2019t want a bunch of noise in their feeds as they\u2019ll see it\u2019s not updated as frequently or with a bunch of responses not relevant to them. A lot of people just enjoy Twitter for the links, and that\u2019s perfectly OK.<\/p>\n I doubled this blog\u2019s Twitter following in just over a month with a single passive tactic: redirecting the links as part of the site template (note, this feed had never been promoted previously). It took a total of 5 minutes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And this is the benefit for\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0brand on the web which has a self-hosted platform like a blog or high traffic website. You gain the ability to direct visitors to social outposts (or anywhere, really) for conversions. This is a huge reason to maintain a self-hosted site and a yet\u00a0another reason\u00a0it doesn\u2019t make sense to\u00a0yield your presence to the stream. You lose one of your highest value, most trusted marketing funnels if you do that.<\/p>\n Since doing this the consistency of people following my personal Twitter handle has been more erratic as there are no longer as many funnels of traffic pointing there. This is actually OK because the priority isn\u2019t marketing myself, it is marketing my brand of media.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Also note I don\u2019t have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. And I don\u2019t care to.\u00a0Nearly everyone\u00a0<\/em>who does has engaged in spam tactics (with some exceptions). The number is silly and not fooling anyone. Instead you should focus on creating an opt-in group who made the decision to follow organically vs. using a script or manually following a bunch of people who aren\u2019t even relevant in the hopes they\u2019ll follow you back.<\/p>\n So followers aside, has there been any change in actual Tweets pointing to content on this site? Let\u2019s look:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The answer is no change, and I wouldn\u2019t expect it to. Because I have focused\u00a0opt-in at the source\u00a0(and experiment with outposts) enough of a following gets this content directly (via RSS or email) in an application with a strong signal to noise ratio. The content the community enjoys gets shared across platforms, including Twitter. But it\u2019s not because I am well-followed or influential there, rather I am reaching people across the web by producing source content. The social web is to a good extent a problem in search of a solution. Maybe you should be the solution (end content) vs. another person pointing at it.<\/p>\n Takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the ancillary benefits to keeping a community is I can conduct\u00a0experiments\u00a0and share results with you here (I can\u2019t … <\/p>\n\n