Posting threads on twitter... Good or bad idea?

Hi all,

I've created a Twitter account for my forum and decided to post my forum's threads to this Twitter account.

I previously did few tests using one of my other Twitter account (used for one of my others sites in the same niche) and I instantly seen a huge increase in guests visitors (mainly bots I guess).

From your experience, is this a good or bad idea to post forum's threads on Twitter and build a parallel community to promote a forum?

 

I had 4 accounts all setup posting my site as well as many of the members forums as well. It went on fine for months if not a year, then I logged in one day and they're all deactivated.
So if you do want to try this I would set it up with a new account or build an account just for these post that you don't mind losing if it dies.
I used Twitterfeed for this.

 

I've been using Twitterfeed to send my threads on over to Twitter and I've been doing it for a while. It works great. You should try it. Its an extra source of promotion, so it'll work in your favor. You could also do a hashtag with your site's name.

 

As long as you don't mind Twitters page outranking your thread in search or others grabbing your feeds content and posting on their sites, it's fine. We've had a few twitter accounts in the past and tried the automated feeds, twitter kept shutting down our accounts after a while for unnatural posting / bot activity. Not to mention, we found our self competing against our own content being used on multiple other sites. Rss feeds posed the same problems for us.

Not everyone will have the same results I'm sure, the above was just our results.

Eric Lyon

 

I think its a great idea to like link different threads on your twitter as it can improve activity and help out the forum in many ways but idk personally never done it myself.

 

I've had client sites get blacklisted by Google for spam content for posting too many links on twitter.
There was a popular mod for vBulletin 4 that did this automatically.
Perhaps if a forum has fewer posts than the thousand or more a day that site had it won't have the same result.
I've always manually posted select quality content links using bit.ly with success.

 

I'll try out Twitterfeed. Hopefully it works with IPB. I've just been posting some threads manually on my Twitter account every once in awhile.

 

It would probably be a better idea to post only popular threads onto twitter, as the spam often isn't ienjoyed and could cause unfollows.

 

Everyone keeps talking about this and I have yet to try it. Does it also help in catapulting the followers for Twitter? The reason I'm asking is because I finally broke over 1,000 followers in Twitter so that I can promote and market for others besides myself.

 

Careful with sharing your twitter network with people looking to advertise, even though you're getting paid, eventually your followers will feel overwhelmed and unfollow or the advertisers will notice people are ignoring their ads & not visiting their sites, which ultimately ends up killing your twitter networks authority in the end. For an example of how people use and kill twitter networks you can visit Fiverr.com and see all the 1k to 10k follower ad plug services. .. though, most those twitter networks on fiverr aren't real people, they have thousands of fake follower accounts claiming they are real. lol ... You don't want to get labelled the same as those guys.

 

Does it make sense to post threads automatically from a forum on Twitter? No! Absolutely not. Twitter wasn't made for that. It was made for people to post their own personal experiences in short statements of 140 characters or less, aka micro-blogs. A forum thread isn't always a personal experience, nor is it always useful content to followers.

I wouldn't blame Twitter, if they caught on to such action and disallowed it by deactivating the account. IF you have followers (without followers any action on Twitter is useless), you are basically filling their Twitter feeds with a ton of unwanted "noise", which is a general problem within social networks anyway, even without such automation.

My suggestion, don't do it! At least not automated.

Scott