Rob cleverly took this leap by sharing my recent retrospective post about the Iraq War on his Twitter account. He then sent me a link to a site which tracks how many times someone reaches my blog post from his tweet. As of press time, fifty-eight people had done so.
Fifty-eight new readers is hard to resist. Rob presented hard evidence that I could reach a lot of new readers if I injected my blog into the Twitterverse. Long story short, I've given into the temptation. I've created a Twitter account at twitter.com/justinis, where any Twitter user can follow my blog and be informed when it's updated.
I know what you're thinking: "But Justin, Twitter is annoying!" You're right! That's why I have no plans to use this account for anything other than links to my blog posts when they are written. So if you don't use Twitter, please continue on in your blissful, Twitter-free world and don't worry about missing anything from me.
Now I'm sure Rob and other members of the Twitter faithful will argue that this is a slippery slope, that once I've had a taste of the Twitter elixir I won't be able to resist. They may be right -- but if they are, it won't be the first time Rob has opened my eyes to something on the interweb.
don't let the pigeon get on twitter!
ReplyDeleteI won't follow WITHOUT the pigeon.
ReplyDeleteI'm following! Awesome.
ReplyDeleteLove the pigeon!!!
ReplyDeleteI know what you're thinking: "But Justin, Twitter is annoying!"
ReplyDeleteI misread this the first time. LOL.
(I'm a bit dilsexic.)
ReplyDeleteLOVE LOVE the Pigeon.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Pigeon (who lives at our house) officially approves this message and will make any guest appearances you may request of him. :-)
Where were those big GRE words when I was studying for the GRE?
ReplyDeleteI'll be interested to see your traffic after a few months of Twitter - keep us posted.
I'm also interesting to see the impact on your site traffic. Do you really think there are people out there who want to read but wouldn't find your blog but would find your twitter?
ReplyDelete@harrison no. having a twitter acct for a blog is kinda like having a gym membership. both can be very effective, but have little benefit if they're unused. currently, justin is simply autoposting to his twitter. it's unlikely (but not impossible) that autoposting will have a significant effect because most people don't like following robots.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Rob, currently only 24% of all tweets are made by robots. As a former member of campaign to elect a robot as student body president of Clemson University, I am sympathetic to the minority voice that robots still hold in our society, and hope that in a small way my robotic Twitter account will be able to champion their cause of freedom.
ReplyDeleteHarrison and Juli - right now I'm getting 10 hits or so per tweet. You can email me later if you want to know how things progress.
ReplyDeleteHave you thought about putting your shared items there too?
ReplyDeleteNot really. That's an idea...
ReplyDeletea good one too, especially if you offer a short reason why you liked or shared the item. then tie in bit.ly and see what happens :)
ReplyDeleteHarrison/Rob - would you make a separate Twitter account for that, or just have it all on twitter.com/justinis?
ReplyDeletedefinitely on @justinis. it's customary to "retweet" articles that people link to as you find them interesting on twitter. so for example, if you tweet about an article i really like and want to share that with my followers, i'll retweet it and attribute you for finding it. then all my followers see you as supercool and perhaps some of them will start following you. those that start following you now get links to your blog posts sent to them, thus increasing your readers/traffic.
ReplyDeleteAgree! A lot of cool articles come from people retweeting on Twitter. You'll have to pick and choose. I'd say you should share less on Twitter than your GoogleReader. I pick one or two articles to share a day on Twitter.
ReplyDelete