It’s hard to succeed in blogging without using social network. You can blog your heart out, but without social networking and active promotion of your blog, the best blog writing tips in the world won’t help you take your site to a professional, higher level.

Have you ever tweeted a link to a really original, awesome article in your niche and were met by crickets chirping? Nobody replied to you. Nobody retweeted. Heck, nobody even clicked on the link to check out the post. You have roughly 902,813 followers, and every single one of them flat out ignored you. Guess what? There’s a reason people are ignoring your tweets.

So why do you have a bunch of followers who seemingly hate your guts?

Actually, it’s very rare that your followers don’t like you at all, though I can say from experience that ex-girlfriends for some reason love to stalk the current girlfriends of guys they aren’t yet over. Unless you have 902,813 crazy female followers, there’s probably another reason your tweets are passing without notice. Let’s look at some of the top issues:

1. You tweet sporadically. When’s the last time you even logged into Twitter? Unless you’re on vacation or in the hospital, you need to use Twitter every day to be in any way successful at it. One tweet per week will typically go ignored.
2. All of your tweets are links. I understand that you want to promote you blog, but if every tweet is a link to your blog, it starts to be white noise. If people want to read every post on your blog, they subscribe to it. They follow you on Twitter to get to know you beyond the blog posts. Remember this is social networking. Socialize!
3. You only tweet about your own blog. If you want people to retweet your links, you have to retweet their links from time to time. Don’t tweet just to get tweet love back – tweet links that you actually find interesting. Think beyond what other bloggers are tweeting. Whenever you read something you think your followers would like, share it, whether you found it through a tweet or not.
4. You tweet the same link a million times. Please, by all means tweet your link once. I even understand tweeting it again later that day, and will let it slide if you tweet it a third time the following day, especially if you’re launching a product or have a post you’re really trying to promote. But if you tweet the same damn link ten times within an hour, I’m going to start ignoring you.
5. They’re afraid a retweet or reply will lead to spam. It’s fine to thank someone for retweeting a link or even send them a DM, but just because someone likes something you’ve posted doesn’t mean they want an all-out assault of you sending them tons of links trying to promote your blog or sell your products.
6. They don’t know you and feel weird interacting with you. It isn’t always possible to to get to know every follower on a personal level, but at least be inviting so that readers feel like they can connect with you. A great way to do this is to ask for advice via twitter. Don’t forget to reply to other people as well to make them feel comfortable replying to you, even if they don’t personally know you.
7. Your followers stink. This sounds a bit harsh, but have you gone about setting up a Twitter account in the right way? If you aren’t careful, your followers might be 99% people who auto-followed you or are just trying to sell something to people in a certain market. Build a quality list of followers, and that starts by 1) sending quality tweets and 2) following quality people that really interest you instead of auto-following a huge list.

To be continued…

Allison Boyer is a writer for BWE’s blog and the owner/manager of After Graduation. She has never stalked an ex-boyfriends current love interest. Ok, maybe once. Don’t judge me!