Using Twitter as Content
Fresh, constantly changing content is the lifeblood of many web sites, but generating content can be challenging. The audience at KidPub are voracious readers of books written for teens and tweens, and we’ve turned to Twitter to help drive traffic to our site.
There are about 150 well-known (to teens at least) authors who regularly use Twitter. We use a simple script developed by Kent Brewster to search Twitter for updates from 100 of these authors and display them on a page called YA Tweets. KidPub readers love it…they can catch the latest news from their favorite authors in what feels like a very intimate way. What did Meg Cabot have for breakfast? What’s Maureen Johnson thinking about as she writes her next book? It’s all there in the tweets. You can see our page in action here.
You can easily apply this technique to your own demographic. What is vitally interesting to your audience? Create a search filter for Twitter that reflects what matters to your readers, and display it on your site. Surround the page with links out to your other content, and you have a self-generating, constantly updating traffic attractor.