Use Twitter to Create Targeted Communities for Blogs

Christine Hitt, Web Editor, Honolulu Magazine

Blogs are a great way for the editors to add content to our site on a weekly basis in order to give readers something new to read, in addition to the monthly print product. They also give the editors an outlet to write stories that they may have otherwise not been able to because of the time constraints of print.

The blogs have increased traffic to the website at a continual growth. Google and other crawlers find the new pages of the blogs within a day of its post and include it in its search engines and RSS feeds giving it maximum exposure.

Blogs have also given us new content to add to our social networks, Facebook & Twitter. They give our Facebook fans and Twitter followers new and engaging material that can be discussed within these unique social networks. We use twitterfeed.com to take the RSS feeds from our blogs and automatically post to our magazine’s Twitter account, www.twitter.com/HonoluluMag. Through this, we’ve found that our posts have generated immediate visits to the website to view the blog articles, as our followers also tend to “re-tweet” (or, re-post) our blog links to their own list of followers.

Now, I am working on creating separate Twitter accounts for particular blogs to further develop an online community that each of the bloggers can actively interact with, which they would thereby draw each of their blog audiences from. For instance, a dining-blogger would have a dining-Twitter account and 75% of the tweets would only be about dining. This micro-blog extension of the real blog on the website creates active interest around each blog and drives even more traffic to the website overall. We’re already noticing an increase in active website visitor numbers, an increase in our acquired visitors and an increase to the amount of visits per blog. Twitter is now also showing up in our top referrals.

Besides the obvious benefits of driving traffic to the website, advertising and marketing departments can also reap from the benefits of having these separate online communities of targeted audiences because these particular online communities are actually ready and willing to read what you tweet—what other tool can say that?

Christine Hitt,
HONOLULU Magazine
Web Editor.
 

Posted by Super on June 4, 2009 at 03:11 PM in | Permalink

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