Earlier this year I had a conversation with Tyme White about twitter and personal branding that had stuck in my head ever since I got off the phone with her. She brought up the fact that I had a lot of twitter followers but where or how would I stay connected with those followers if twitter goes down (fail whale) , twitter gets purchased by google & closed like Pownce or their business model just doesn’t work and everyone leaves the community. We talked about how some people who I admire like Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuck have huge online followers despite twitter. Robert has a large following and readership on his blog before twitter and the same for @GaryVee but we do know they both have used twitter to extend their brand.
As for 1938Media, I was reading the Remarkablogger site and saw a video of Loren Feldman at a blogging conference where he said: “the most important thing in your digital life is your personal blog”. This was after Wired Magazine posted an article called: Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004. To Wired’s point I think the post was written to start a conversation but it did have some good meat to it.
Some points of the article talked about how more people are spending more time on social networks and less on blogs. But in my case what am I to do? I have 11,610 followers on twitter, I just started this blog with 92 feedburner subscribers, 563 Linkedin contacts and 716 facebook friends. If twitter goes down how would I stay connected with those 11,610 followers, will they subscribe to my feed, connect on Linkedin or Facebook?
While we wait for Twitter to figure out how to make money, staying connected and having a global reach with my twitter followers is where I see the true value in twitter but as 2009 come close I’m getting nervous about what’s next. So I’m taking advice from Tyme and 1938Media and making my blog a priority but with new blogs launching everyday and people spending more time on social networking sites just have a text based blog is going to be hard to stand out from the crowd, but I have a plan.
The SocialWayne.com blog plan.
- Continue to use micro-blogs and social networks to reach new subscribers
- Make the blog as interactive as possible (more features such as chat coming soon)
- Use multiple blog content for posting: Audio and Video post. You can already subscribe to socialwayne.com in iTunes
- Content is still king. Be creative in writing, give away free advice, seek guest writers
- Be original “Think Different”
- Partner with Friends for link exchanges
- Guest write on other blogs for exposure
- Make socialwayne.com more like a service and a social networking site to make users stick
Will it work? Only time will tell, either way if I’m not tweeting as much as I used to, I’ll be blogging here.
Also for those who wonder how I got 11,000 followers on twitter, I’m working on a blog post about that too. It’s going in my F.A.Q section.
Question: If you would start a new blog today, what would you do to grow your audience?
