Blogging and twitter

[Paintyourbox]

I recently started blogging and joined twitter as a means of promoting my blog. It's my hobby rather than something to make a living out of but I wondered how many of you use Twitter to promote your blogs and also how you go about it?

Hi Paintyourbox
I would say that the first thing you need to know is that you cannot simply post links to your blog on twitter and hope that someone will read them. Twitter is a communicative tool - that means you have to follow some people and hope they follow you back.

I found Twitter a great way of promoting my blog, but you really do have to be willing to spend a bit of time building a following. This won't happen overnight so you have to be patient.

I have loads more tips here and this post is more about campaigns, but is quite relevant for bloggers too.

Along with what MMeL said, you can't just follow. You need to interact. It's not called social media for nothing!

Thanks for the advice!! I am a bit rubbish with tech stuff so think I need to brush up on how to use Twitter first!

I use dlvr:it to automatically send my blog posts to my twitter (and facebook) accounts, but as the others have said you need to interact with people too. I find more people engage on G+ than twitter in terms of comments, but most of my clock throughs are from twitter so meta data is important for searches there.

Purple
I will admit to not using Google+ at all. I did sign up but it is a bit much to do that as well as Twitter and FB. How do you find it?

I have to say I haven't used it a lot since it was first launched... My day job is ed tech so loads of people added me from that, and then I got added into lots of vegan, veggie and food blogging circles (I blog about food) and it's kinda snowballed from there. With blogger as the platform it's very easy to integrate the blog posts into G+ and I can reply to comments from my chrome tab in blogger rather than having to go to the specific page which makes it easier to manage.

Twitter is a GREAT way for getting traffic to your blog, and for finding people who are interested in the same kind of thing you are and likely to want to read your blog posts.
With Twitter, to get the most out of it you need to remember it's the opposite to Facebook - you WANT people you don't know to read your posts, you WANT them to interact with what you're saying.
Follow other bloggers, and engage in tweets/chat with them. That way you'll slowly but surely build up a following and readers. Don't just tweet links to your blog either, you need to 'chat' too.
Oh and put a picture up on your Twitter profile (if you haven't already) as people might think you're spam and ignore you!