Earlier this month Zee explained “How to Snap Up that Twitter Username You’ve Always Wanted“. We were stuck with a
Twitter name for the blog here that, well, sucked. Our Twitter name was @NextWebLog which made sense when we registered it, as @TheNextWeb was taken, but just didn’t feel right.
So last week I decided to contact Twitter to ask if they could, pretty please, change our Twitter name to @TheNextWeb. That account was taken but never used and didn’t have any followers either. Within 48 hours I got a reply that my wish had been granted.
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Since then we have been actively using it to promote the blog and keep in touch with out readers. As The Next Web Conference is approaching (only 65 days & 85 early bird tickets left!) we want to get more feedback from readers and keep everybody up-to-date on new speakers and start-ups. The blog is important for that but Twitter seems even better.
We automatically post a link to every blogpost we publish on Twitter as an alternative to RSS. people seem to like that and are now also actively retweeting those links.
We have been very focused on getting more RSS readers and even set a goal of 10.000 readers in April. It seems however that our readers are more interested in receiving notifications of new blogposts via Twitter than via RSS. RSS certainly has its advantages but right now I’m getting more interested in Twitter. Compared to the one-way communication of RSS the two-way communication with Twitter is a lot more interesting.
If you have a brand, product or blog now it the time to get yourself a Twitter account and use it to build your audience. Could you imagine a blog without RSS? No? Within a few months you will feel the same about a blog without a Twitter Account.
As you can see in the TwitterCounter graph up here we have been steadily adding Followers for the last few weeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to 10000 followers on twitter before we get to 10000 RSS subscribers…
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