When publishers first started writing blogs, they were meant to be nothing more than online diaries, a place for people to write their thoughts and feelings… and let anyone read them who wanted to. They’ve become much more than that.
Today, blogs are a very effective publishing system. They’ve evolved to become online magazines rather than personal pages. The benefit is that publishers can now write about anything they want — and get paid for it too.
The disadvantage is that they’re no longer personal. If readers used to come to blogs to find what the writer was doing or thinking now, today’s blogs are often not even written by the bloggers themselves.
The first thing that Twitter can do for a blog then is to bring back the personality of the publisher. Bloggers can use Twitter to give readers a peek behind the scenes of their business, provide quick notices about their plans and the posts they’re working on, and answer direct questions put to them by readers.
Sure, you can also do all of this on your blog — and ideally, you should. But when your blog really takes off, it’s unlikely that you’ll have time to respond to every comment your posts receive.
Articles about your blog are also likely to be less interesting to your readers than posts about cars, photography or whatever it is that users are visiting your site to see.
Twitter can gives publishers of blogs an alternative space to get closer to their readers, even when they’re using content written by professional writers.
But what if you want to bring in new readers or increase the views of occasional visitors? Twitter can help there too.