Using Twitter? Here's a Promotion Tip

DomainReport.ca

Twitter is a great free promotion tool to help bring awareness to your blog or website.  Many businesses and blogs, including those in the domaining world, are now promoting their sites through Twitter.

One of the ways to promote your site through Twitter is to add your URL into your profile inside the Website box.  Another way is to include links to your blog posts or webpages when you send out a tweet.  These are both common promotion practices that almost everyone knows.

But many don't know that there is another important way you can promote your website link through Twitter!

When you search on Twitter for people to follow, you enter a keyword or keywords and a list of Twitter accounts is displayed in a long list.  In this list, you'll see the account icons, account names, their Bios, and a Follow button.  The website URL they may have added to their Profile Website box does not show up on this list.  So how do you get your URL to show up here?

There is a way to put your URL in your BIO box so that it is a live link (people can click on it and go to your website instantly from the search results), and not just part of the text.

Here is what to do:

Login to your Twitter account, go to Settings and then go to Profile.

In the Profile section, scroll down to the box that is beside 'Bio'.  This is where you normally put text with a description of yourself or your company.  In this box, type in your URL at the front of your existing text in this format:  http://www.YourWebsite.com

You have to add the http://  for the link to show up live in your Bio.  Click Save changes at the bottom, then go back to your main Twitter homepage that shows your Bio.  You should see a live link now in your Bio description.  The reason I say to put the URL in the front of your Bio text is because then it will show up right under your name and username on your profile page.

Now, when your Twitter account gets shown in search results it will have a live link in it.  Sure, someone could click though to your Twitter account page and find your website link there, this just lets them see your link sooner and gives you more potential traffic.  For example, even if someone doesn't end up following you they may click through to your website from the search results.  Make it easy for them to do so!

Here is an example of my Twitter profile page with the live link under my username:
http://twitter.com/domains

If you already know about this, great, but from what I've seen most people don't.  I only caught onto this recently when I was looking at Twitter search results and seeing live website links in some profile Bios, and not in others. I investigated further and learned what I had to do to have my link show up too.

Just to show how infrequently this is done, when I do a Twitter search for Who to Follow using the keyword "domains", only 3 out of the first 30 accounts has a live link in their Bio (and one of the three is Godaddy!).  In my opinion, the other 27 (or 90%) are missing out on a chance to get a direct click to their website.  No one doing a search is going to click through to every account in the results to see the website URL, but they might click through to a website directly from the search results.

There is a lot of competition and activity on Twitter now, so you should take advantage of every chance to get some of that traffic.  No, this tip won't create a flood of new Twitter traffic to your site, but it gives you a good chance to get more traffic than you're already getting, and on the Web every visitor counts!

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Learn about Twitter hashtags at Hashtag360.com
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