We’ve been talking about social media and traffic lately.
One of the blogging strategies we’ve shared showed you how to write posts that others were likely to share.
It’s a pretty cool way to create a win-win situation for your readers and for those that you write about. Your readers get interesting information in a list form, which always seems to be popular. And the people you write about and include in your posts want as many people to read about them as possible because the article says something nice.
Well now we have another little Twitter strategy that can get you more mentions. It follows the same idea of mentioning those you write about when you share the post on Twitter, but this time it’s about automating the process.
Trick: Add Twitter Handles To Your Blog Titles
My personal site is Country Music Life. It’s something I like to maintain and have been maintaining for the last four years. It’s fun to stay in the country music scene a little bit by keeping up on all the new song releases.
The posts on the site are reviews of new songs. Since the site has been up I’ve noticed that a few of the artists will retweet and share the posts on Twitter (and other social media sites). I usually only review songs I like so the reviews are generally positive. And the artists appreciate that so they often re-share the post.
With WordPress and Jetpack you can have each new post automatically share on your social sites including Twitter. That’s really the only social sharing on do for CML and one day after getting another retweet from an artist I had a thought.
What if I just put the Twitter handle of the artist in the blog title on WordPress?
This would allow me to mention the artist on Twitter automatically. They would likely see the tweet mentioning them and be more likely to retweet it.
My first thought was that this might be weird; putting a Twitter handle right in a blog title, but then I figured that social handles are everywhere these days. People are putting them in posts, on TV commercials and everywhere else. There are also hashtags everywhere so today’s world are up on what a Twitter handle is.
I decide d it wouldn’t be weird and that it would be worth a test.
So I’ve been including handles right in the blog titles.
Here’s an example:
When I’m done writing the post I’ll just open Twitter and search for the artist. I’ll copy their Twitter handle and add it to the title.
Then when the post automatically shares on Twitter it’ll mention the artist and they’ll possibly retweet it like JJ did:
I would say the mentioning has increased retweets and traffic on and from Twitter for CML. I plan to continue using the strategy.
Action Steps For Your Blog
Every blog is different. You might not want to do this with all your posts, but there are likely opportunities to try it.
If you’re writing about someone or something as a feature or review on your blog then mention them right in the blog title.
You could also try adding hashtags to your title. I haven’t tried that one yet, but it’s on my list to possible try for the Ghost Blog Writers Blog. We’ll have to see how that one goes.
Until then I’ll keep testing this mention strategy because it seems to be working.