Habitually Good

Twitter is the new Digg. It is the new StumbleUpon. Yes, it is all of that and more. of course, you won’t see that it is all that unless you look through the obvious differences and what it does for content owners

Of course, we want to begin by asking, what do Stumble Upon, Digg, and others offer content owners in the first place. Well, the answer is simple: they offer a platform to showoff their content to millions of potential readers.

So, how does Twitter help content owners. On Digg and StumbleUpon if you write the right stuff, and know the right people, you can get your content to be fairly popular. On Twitter, the same applies.

The first thing you need are Followers. And no just any followers, you need genuine people as followers (see my post on twitter followers). Once you have a good set of followers, you need to write content which is above average. Guy Kawasaki has a great article on How to get ReTweeted. I strongly suggest that you read this article.

Now, that you have a group of followers, and you write good stuff, just send out a tweet or two letting your followers know about the content that you just published. And sit back and wait (if you use LiveWriter, you can make your life easier by using TwitterNotify).

This is what will happen, some of your followers will read your content, and like it. They will then go back and ReTweet your tweet (if this is not happening, you should encourage your readers to Tweet/ReTweet about your content – here’s my post on ReTweeting). The moment a follower ReTweet’s your tweet, the cycle potentially repeats with their followers and so on.

The net effect is that your content gets a lot of eyeballs very quickly. Of course, some of these viewers may be savvy enough to subscribe to your RSS feed, or stumble your content, or digg it.

You should remember of course, that even if you get a few ReTweets, this can mean a lot of views because a lot of people will just come and look at the content (and not follow it up by ReTweeting). Just to see what is potentially possible. Here’s what happened when one of my posts got tweeted first, and then ReTweeted about 10-15 times (the graph below shows daily visits to my blog):

The last two dots represent the days that one of my blog posts was getting ReTweeted about.

The ReTweet effect is truly viral.

In this post, I have to ask – if you are on Twitter, please Tweet/ReTweet this post. Thanks.

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