5 Ways To Introducing Your Site To Twitter

So I talked about the Moonfruit contest last week and mentioned how viral Twitter can be. Well, let me say this first though–only if you do the right stuff will Twitter campaigns be viral. This actually is quite hard. Why? The biggest reason behind it is because anything you do with originality will catch the eyes of many. As I am not exactly a machine that spits out original contests and campaigns you can do with Twitter, I won’t force myself in that route. However, I will share with you all on some of the things that has been done before that help get your site out there in the Twitterverse.

Adding Your Site to Profile

This is a no-brainer that you should do. Although Twitter is rapidly growing to be a service that pretty much everyone uses (like Facebook), it still is dominated by people with some degree of website building background knowledge. If you have a half-decent Twitter page with timely updates, getting a click from your fellow Twitter users through the Web field is not hard at all.

If you don’t have it in right now, set it up straight away! You are definitely missing out. If you don’t know, in your Twitter account, click “Settings” and then fill out the “More info URL” field.

Distributing Free Twitter Backgrounds

Let me be honest with you. I have not tried this technique myself, but I strongly believe that it is a fail-proof strategy. Recall all those free wordpress themes? Well, if you examine closely, all of the free themes will have some sort of a link back to the original theme creator. That’s right, they are giving themselves back both a do-follow link and exposure on your blog (if you use a free theme). Well, why can’t it not be done with Twitter backgrounds?

Twitter backgrounds (at least the ones I’ve used) tend to be 1600×1200 pixel. If you are a whiz with Photoshop or even Paint, you can create some dazzling backgrounds for fellow Twitter users. Then, as you are interested in promoting your brand, you can put a small logo on the top-right corner of the background. However, a thing to note here is that you should definitely lower your logo’s opacity, so that you don’t kill the design.

Contests with Hashtags

Remember the Moonfruit contest I talked about yesterday? Well, you can do that too! A quick overview on how the contest would/should run for your maximum exposure and benefit would be:

• Create a contest
• Make participating in the contest easy; let them retweet your ad tweet
• Make sure that you utilize your site’s domain’s hashtag and not something random (eg. #ahnternet, not #myfirstcontest)
• Don’t forget to link to your blog’s original post
• Make it so that every tweet counts as an entry; this makes people use your hashtag like oxygen

This seems to be the strategy Moonfruit took and it seems like it is flawless, at least until Twitter puts a restriction on this. However, I doubt such restrictions would come into play anytime soon, so I guess you’ve got some time to try this out if you are thinking of running a contest in the near future.

Twitter.com/YOUR_DOMAIN

This is also a no-brainer. You SHOULD get the same name on Twitter as you have with your domain name. In my case, I have Twitter.com/ahnternet for this blog. Had @ahnternet been taken, I probably would have registered @ahnternetcom or something along those lines.

I tweet about my random day to day things @Static, and although a good portion of my followers are highly concentrated on that Twitter account, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t use @ahnternet. Whatever gets posted on @ahnternet, I can always just re-tweet on @Static to give whatever I’m tweeting, maximum exposure.

Your Own URL Shortener

So we all know how Bit.ly, Tr.im, Cli.gs and the likes are pretty nice tools that let you track while also redirecting your visitors. However, I believe that you can really make yourself stand out by just giving a direct link to the post. What am I talking about? Let me give you an example, in the case you are using WordPress.

So the URL of Twitter Is REALLY Viral is:

http://www.ahnternet.com/2009/07/16/twitter-is-really-viral/

Obviously, that is way too long for Twitter’s 140 character maximum. However, what if you setup a redirection through your hosting control panel so that a URL along the lines of:

http://ahnternet.com/t/1

redirected to the post above? I believe that is an exposure right there. Fortunately, if you are using cPanel (which most hosts use), Awstats will track that link too similar to what URL redirection services provide. Okay, so this way can be a little bit annoying, but if you have a redirecting routine setup, it shouldn’t take you more than a couple minutes. Are you not willing to invest a couple more minutes to receive much more exposure to your site’s address and brand?

Conclusion

I have only recently started to aggressively use Twitter. Hence, I’m probably not the guru that you need in the middle of the night if you are trying to do something on Twitter. However, I feel that my experience on it so far helps me confidently state that these tips are fail-proof and Twitter 101. Exposing your site’s address and brand simply cannot get easier.

I’m the type that won’t just end it with this post, so I’m going to go ahead and try these out tips myself too (especially the contest one). Of course I’ll write a follow up post. However, I have a darn good feeling that all five of these will benefit you brilliantly.

What’s your view on this topic? Think I was completely off? Was I spot on? I’d like to hear what you have to say, so comments are more than welcome!