Twitip

This is a guest post by Larry Mitchell, who publishes several personal finance blogs, including Out of Debt Christian. Follow him at @christiandebt.

We were honored that TwiTip ran a guest post from one of our bloggers a few weeks ago (Using Twitter to Save Money) and have been thrilled by how popular that post has become.  We welcomed hundreds of new followers, dozens of regular new blog readers, and the TwiTip post has been retweeted over 200 times, making it the most popular retweet on March 15^th (according to Retweetist). With Twitter being the media darling of the moment, there is no shortage of stories about it in the traditional media, and many bloggers are churning out daily lists of people you may want to follow; any of which can lead to a sudden surge in followers. Here’s what we did right and wrong in handling our moment in the sun:

• Speak up. People are checking out your profile because you’ve been presented as someone who frequently has something interesting to say. Make sure that you’ve been actively tweeting recently and that these tweets reflect topics you generally like to write about. I recently read an interesting article about chefs using Twitter and was excited to discover that @nappleman, one of my favorites, was mentioned. However, his account was just a week old and he’d only made seven updates, making me think that he was in the article more because he has a great PR person rather than frequently generates great commentary.
• Look the part. Though my fellow bloggers and I are all very active via our personal accounts, we had only recently created @ChristianDebt as a Twitter account for our blog. We wanted to be sure to look established to our new potential followers, so we quickly had a profile page designed for $25 by a designer we found on Craigslist. We also invited the followers of our personal accounts and our blog readers to follow our new blog account upon its launch, adding some quality readers (and yes, some heft) to our follower count.
• Be active. Make sure that your account seems active and vibrant. We were frequently engaged with our new Twitter account on the day that our Twitip post ran, responding to messages from new followers, thanking people for favorable retweets, and reciprocating new follows. We also quickly responded to tweets and blog comments that pointed out that we had used the incorrect URL to a site we recommended in our post. In the days that followed, we’ve stuck to our goal of two or three interesting tweets per day about topics related to what we blog about.
• Connect with connections. Something we neglected to do was give a heads-up to other people we had mentioned in the TwiTip post, so that they could reciprocate the goodwill. We recommended that people follow @cheapcheapcheap without mentioning anything to him. He didn’t know why his follower count surged that day, and even tweeted that he wondered where all of his new followers were coming from instead of welcoming people who had discovered him via our post.
• Stay on topic. Avoid the temptation to go all Twitter, all the time. Remember that Twitter is just another way to communicate and not necessarily what your readers or followers want to incessantly hear about from you. We gave a nod to our new readers and followers by publishing a follow-up post on our blog, Even More Tips for Making and Saving Money on Twitter, but otherwise we’ve returned our focus to what we’ve typically blogged about. Our existing readers seem to enjoy the occasional mention of Twitter tips and strategies, and most of our new ones have stuck with us because they are interested in our discussion of finances, frugality and faith.