Twitter Knitter

I have been using Twitter for a while, my hip younger sister Abby turned me onto it the summer before last. I joined, made a few comments to her, then promptly left for more engaging reading over at Ravelry and my favorite craft blogs (see sidebar). I didn't see how Twitter could be really even very interesting, let alone a marketing tool for communicating with other folks about the projects I'm working on. Of course I was wrong.

In the last 6 months, I have taken another stab at Twitter, and follow some of my favorite bloggers, crafters and friends. When I post it's a combination of behind-the-scenes, inspiration, little jokes, frustration-venting and project progress-reports. I like those kind of posts from other crafters too, so when I purchased the "Creating a Blog Audience" e-book from Diane at CraftyPod, I followed her on Twitter as well.

That book made me think more about how blogs are all about community- building it, sharing it. I've been reading copious craft blogs for years, but I rarely commented, feeling like I wasn't really a part of the conversation. We also had hardly any comments on our blog. We get a respectable number of readers, but it's such a treat to get comments, and one of my goals is to not only increase the traffic to our site, but have more of a conversation between Laura and I and our readers. Diane's book showed me the importance of the give-and-take conversations that people have though their blogs. By reaching out just a bit, leaving more comments, posting links to other craft blogs, and using Twitter, we have noticed more traffic, more comments, more connections (and more sales) while we try to foster a relationship to more of our crafty comrades. Twitter and other social media sites can be another way to continue the connection, the conversation. 

While reading the giant conversation of little-bits that is Twitter, I saw that last week Diane offered her e-book "Social Media for your Crafty Business" to the first 10 people who send her a message.  I responded lickety-split and she send me a copy of the e-book. I am currently reading and working my way through it- I'll let you know what I come up with, but until then, catch up with me on Twitter!