You’ll often see me tweet the same blog posts over and over. When I write one, I push it onto my Facebook and Google+ pages and into my Linkedin stream – once. But I’ll tweet it several times over the course of a couple days. If you haven’t noticed, Twitter is different. Nobody goes and hangs out on someone’s Twitter page waiting for them to tweet something. No, on Twitter we are all swimming in a big pool together. We splash around, laugh, share stuff. But it’s not an archival-based medium. It’s real time. And real time is awesome. But that’s why I’ll push a post multiple times there.

I have access to tens of thousands of potential readers via my Twitter stream. And I know how many people read my posts. So if I only have 80 visitors after one push, I’ll just assume most people didn’t see it and then push it again in a few hours. Usually after a few pushes on Twitter, I’ll know whether or not a posts resonates. Especially considering any engagement in the other mediums. I never have any ‘goals’  for my posts – I just share life. But I do want to share it with as many people as possible, so I’m always excited to know that something I’ve written is shared by others. That means I’m doing my job as a writer and getting inside of people.

I’m no idiot. I realize that not everything I write is gold. But I’m not writing for gold. I’m writing because I must. If my experiences touch others, that’s pretty cool. And the only way I can ensure that what I’m sharing has the best chance of touching as many people as possible is to send the post out into the pool like a beach ball. Depending on the mood of the people swimming, the ball will either get bounced around, tossed out, or popped. So that’s why I push the same posts out over and over. In case you were wondering.

There is one other thing I’ll add since we’re on the topic of blogging, publishing and all that – when you write about social media in any capacity, you get a ton of traffic. I recently wrote a post on Foursquare that already has thousands of views in a little over a week. And it makes perfect sense. Think about it – what is the one thing we all have in common? Right. We’re all using social media. Some people I know here are parents, so some of my posts about family life resonates with them. Some people I know here are entrepreneurs, so some of the posts I write on that topic get pushed around inside of those circles. Same thing goes for posts I write about advertising. Or posts about politics. Or sports. Or movies. There are niches, and audiences, for everything. I’ve never adhered to a ‘topic’ on this blog however (the name is intended to be ironic, if you didn’t know) and prefer to write about whatever is swirling around me that I find interesting. But just like in writing to mass audiences in advertising when you have to simplify things down to their core in order to appeal to the most eyeballs and brains, when you blog about topics that are relevant to most of the masses – you’re going to get more traffic. Talent has very little to do with it, actually. So if you’re into blogging exclusively for traffic, at the expense of your heart, I highly recommend writing about social media. You can’t go wrong.

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Jim Mitchem

Wonder, Childhood, and the Letting Go.
Terrible Silences

Jim Mitchem

Writer. Father to daughters. Husband. Ad man. Raised by wolves. @jmitchem on twitter. First novel, Minor King, out now.

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