We have published a fair few articles on promoting your content, and also done several reviews on sites like Meta and explored new promotional sites like Copromote. Quite a few people in the forum on our photo hosting site ClickASnap have asked about promoting their content on Twitter so here is some pointers!
Firstly if you don’t have an account set one up. Twitter, if used correctly, is far more effective than Meta is by orders of magnitude. You need followers to share your content with so go and find Twitter accounts that have similar interests to you. So in our case, we look for photography related twitter accounts. Search through their followers and follow accounts that purport to be about photography, these accounts are 1) the ones that are most likely to follow us back, and 2) these people are likely to engage and be interested in what our tweets say. Building up followers take time and effort, but in the long run it is incredibly valuable.
Once you have some followers and content on ClickASnap use a tool like Manageflitter to manage who unfollows you, who you should follow and ultimately grow your following over time. Do not buy followers whatever you do this will screw up your account forever. Growing a following takes time, as does anything worth doing, but once you have those engaged followers you have an audience that you can share your content with anytime you wish to.
Tweeting; this is the crux of it all. Just sharing tweet after tweet of your photos is unlikely to bring much traffic to you. You need to share interesting and valuable information then intersperse this with your photos, and actually, sharing other peoples photos and tweets too. The more generous you are sharing other peoples content, the more likely people are going to share your content.
When tweeting your photos, try and tweet a link directly to your photo. Don’t upload a photo to twitter then paste a link to your profile underneath. This will do nothing as people have already seen all of your content, so why would they click through to your profile?
Don’t over tweet, or do bursts of tweets, spread them out over the day, you can use software like hootsuite to automatically post your content at the times you choose. Or go a step further and use software like Social sprout to automatically analyse you audience and tweet at peak times!
Use a site like bit.ly to track click throughs and optimise your tweets to maximise the traffic you gain from them.
All in all, engage with other users, create conversations. Find one person per day and reply directly to their tweet, if they answer back then work on that and build a relationship. Above all, don’t ram your content down people’s throats, or constantly say ‘come and look at my photo’ because doing this will gert you no where.
We hope you find this useful, if you have any other ideas then pop them in the comments below