Has Twitter Taken You Away From Blogging?
May 14, 2008
Welcome to BloggingNotes. You may want to subscribe to my full text RSS feed. This message will only appear once. Thanks for visiting!
It doesn’t necessarily need to be Twitter - it could be Pownce, or Jaiku. Even FriendFeed could fit into the category. While some might claim that Twitter is a waste of time, I’m finding that I’m spending more time following it than I am following my RSS feeds. And I’m not the only one.
A lot of the people that I follow have a plug-in installed in their Wordpress setup that automatically sends a post to Twitter when a post goes live. Right now I have 220 followers on Twitter, and less than 50 RSS subscribers to BloggingNotes.
Finding out about new posts is just one of the benefits I’ve found from Twitter. A lot of times, breaking news stories will show up on Twitter before they’ll show up on blogs, simply because there’s no delay like there is in posting something to a blog and then having Feedburner pick it up and update your feed, sometimes hours later. Too slow for some cases.
Don’t get me wrong, though - I’m not saying that I prefer Twitter to blogging at all - Twitter is a maximum of 140 characters per post - an information burst. And the feedback and comments that I get from blogging are much more valuable in the long run if you ask me.
Use Twitter to complement your blogging - that’s its best feature. And if you follow enough people, rest assured that you’ll eventually get quite a few post ideas from it.
Which is always a good thing.
(If you would like to follow me on Twitter, visit http://twitter.com/rodtempleton)
Related Posts
Posted in Blogging
content rss
May 14th, 2008 at 7:40 am
I like to use twitter as a way to a) create buzz about something or b) promote a new blog post.
I also use it to ask short quick questions or to rant about something that has happened in my daily life.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Twitter is a lot more convenient because you can see what a hundred people are saying/doing a lot easier than with an RSS feed. Since RSS feeds could show more than one thing from the same person, you avoid that with Twitter since it only shows the most recent thing they’re doing. It’s a lot like the status feature in facebook and that is a big success because of just how convenient it is on a large scale.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
@Tyler: Exactly - it’s a great way to make an announcement regarding a post, and can definitely bring in traffic that you might not have ordinarily seen. And sometimes the rants are the best thing about it
May 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
@Dean: I couldn’t agree more. It allows you to potentially generate more immediate traffic than standalone RSS simply because your readers learn about new posts the instant they go live in some cases.
Thanks very much for the feedback.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Hey Rod, do you knjow the name of or have a link for that plugin?
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..7 Ways To Boost Sales
May 17th, 2008 at 8:05 am
@Dennis - Sure do - it’s called WordTwit, and you can download it from http://www.bravenewcode.com/wordtwit/
Be aware though, that it has an issue with WP 2.5.1 - when you publish a post, you’ll get a PHP error, but it will still send the post to your Twitter. Hopefully that’s something they’re working on.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Thanks! I’m still using 2.3.3
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..7 Ways To Boost Sales
May 26th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Oh, cool plug-in! Thanks for directing me to that, it’s a great idea! I’ve just installed it - now we’ll see if it twits.
VagabondetteVA’s last blog post..106 Organizations That Are Changing the World - Are you helping?
May 27th, 2008 at 6:45 am
It’s a great plug-in, if a little frustrating. Like I mentioned above to Dennis, you’ll get PHP errors if you’re using Wordpress 2.5.1, and I even get a post error when I publish a post in Windows Live Writer.
However, the post still does publish, and the tweet goes out, so in the end it does what it promises.
Thanks very much for the comment.
May 27th, 2008 at 7:14 am
I don’t plan o upgrade any time soon. I may even manually install 2.3.3 on other blogs.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Under Promise - Over Deliver For Greater Success