Twitter and other such services have given even the blandest of humans a platform to push content to masses of other people. For people who would are so simple that blogging might have not yielded much attention, can now grow a huge following on Twitter. Followers are power, so the more followers you have, the more eyeballs you control. This is why there is never enough followers to be had on Twitter. It is never enough.
With this newfound power, there is also confusion on how to build up a personal brand using Twitter. For instance, what are the moral rules behind things like linking to your own content? From two seperate surveys on Twitter, totaling in around 20 responses, I figured that linking to your own content is perfectly acceptable. Most people linked to their own content, and felt that it was perfectly fine if others did the same.
That is logical enough, but, is it only right simply due to the fact that we all do it? That hardly seems to be a methodlolgy for finding what is right. Like many mothers have said to their sons or daughters, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?” We need to look deeper at this issue.
Now, when I post a link to my blog, or some other content that I have an interest in, what am I doing? I am supplying access to that content, via a link, to people that have opted to follow me on Twitter. I am of course not coercing them to view that content. Now, if I was link baiting, that is seperate. But at the core, this provison of access does not seem to be problematic. I extend the open basket, and those that wish pick a piece of fruit from it. If you dislike the content that I have given you, you can drop the fruit and never return. Unfollow me, if you have gotten lost in the analogy.
And I suppose that if you expect other people to read your content, you should read theirs as well. Often people mark their specific links as “[blog post]” or somesuch, which ads clarity. Perhaps it would be better to invent a new hashtag that mark all pesonal tweets, perhaps “#mine,” to mark anything that you made, and #aff (for affiliated) for anything that you are, surprise, affiliated with.
Moving in a different direction, if you often use Twitter to promote your content, you are probably receiving more traffic then you can reciprocate by visiting other sites on your own, so you need to give back in a different way. This is for anyone with more than 1000 followers. Once you hit that threshold you need to start retweeting important content several times daily.
In this, you return the favor of using a following (yours) to promote content (not yours). It’s the perfect yang to your yin of self promotion. My rule of thumb is that I try to retweet two bits for every piece I link that has my name on it. It only seems fair.
