Established bloggers might at first belittle microblogging services like Twitter as being for lazy writers. After all, you can’t post much with the 140-character limit. You just answer the question “What are you doing?” and you’re good to go. But these people miss the point. Twitter is not just for shouting out what you’re doing at the moment. Social media users have begun banking on Twitter as a means of mobilizing their network and as a means of marketing their content. Actually, it’s no longer about what you are doing, but rather more of how you are connecting.

Content developers and social media marketers have discovered how useful Twitter is in driving traffic to their sites, and stirring up conversation about topics they blog about. With about six million users, Twitter definitely offers a lot of opportunity in connecting with people of like interests. However, some users get it wrong, in that they often just start an account and automatically tweet each and every blog post they publish, thinking the whole world is reading.

Here are a few pointers when using Twitter to market a blog or just about anything for that matter.

Build up your network first

One of the more important metrics in Twitter is the number of followers. This indicates how many people are subscribed to your updates. The more followers you have, the more people will read your tweets. However, quantity is not everything. Quality is definitely a better indicator of your authority and importance in Twitter. Network with the right people, and you’ve got yourself an audience who can do the viral marketing for you.

Engage in meaningful discussions

Apart from being simply a way to publish short updates, Twitter is actually more of a communication device. Lauded as the “IRC of social media” more and more people are using Twitter to chat in two-way conversations, rather than just post one-way updates. And everyone else can listen in, much like the CB radio of the 1960′s. And so one way of sharing the message is by engaging in conversations relevant to your niche. Don’t simply post links to your blog. But talk about your post, and the topic itself, and encourage discussion.

Find people with the same interests

Twitter accounts usually have a natural rate of growth when it comes to followers. You follow friends you already know, they follow you back, and their friends follow you, and so forth. But you should also be active in seeking out other people who you may not necessarily know, but have the same interests. You can use Twitter’s search function to look for tweets with keywords that are relevant to your niche. If you blog about Macs, for instance, then you can do a search for keywords like #mac or #apple. You can then respond to tweets by people who post on these topics. You can make new friends!

Viral marketing is not just a push mechanism. If you keep on just posting automated tweets containing links to your blog posts, then you would be no different from a spammer. Be a real person. Be part of the conversation. That’s how to market your blog on Twitter.

Many bloggers make the mistake of writing posts that are too short. The popularity of microblogging services like Twitter, and Internet users’ short attention spans have made us hungry for information, and yet unable to stick to reading one page for more than 30 seconds.

However, still a lot of other bloggers make the mistake of writing posts that are too long. Sure, long posts may contain a lot of useful information. But who really reads posts that look like term papers? Personally, my attention span can only stand about three paragraphs or so. Then, I usually just skip to the end, or scan for keywords.

But here’s something that can help: headers. They’re friendly to both people and search engines. Headers can be used to make important points on your post stand out. Enclosing text in <h2></h2> or <h3></h3> highlights your text in bigger, bolder letters.

Headers help readers scan for important points

Human eyes have a knack for sighting text that stands out. Hence, you should take the opportunity to organize your blog posts according to the important points. This way, readers who have short attention spans (meaning most of us) can more easily scan through your content. Now they won’t get lost in the maze of words. If they see a word or phrase that catches their attention, then they can just head on to that particular heading and paragraph.

Headers help you organize your thoughts

Another mistake of bloggers is to ramble on and on about all sorts of stuff that are mostly unassociated. And so readers get lost in your train of thought. Smart bloggers organize their articles, and one way you can do this is by using headers. This helps you keep your paragraphs cohesive and coherent, as each main idea is organized under its own header.

Headers help search engines scan for important keywords

Headers also increase your blog’s search engine optimization by helping search bots identify the important keywords and key phrases on your posts. Crawlers sent by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines usually get relevant keywords from a webpage’s title, meta data, and headers.

Also, importance of keywords are ranked according to hierarchy. So headers under <h1></h1> are more important than those under <h2></h2>, and so forth. On most blog design templates, the post title is enclosed in <h1></h1> tags. And so designers usually use either the H2 or H3 tag to identify important points in the body text.

In conclusion, a lot of bloggers are overly concerned about optimizing their blogs for search engines. However, one of the best ways to do SEO is to give more importance to human readers rather than the machine. This means using relevant headlines, and using headers to organize according to important points. Try spicing up your posts with headers, and see how your readers will appreciate it.