A Beginners Guide to Microblogging
Bringing journalism to your fingertips.
So, have you recently been interested in getting into microblogging? Well, you probably already have a microblog believe it or not as platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are all microblogging platforms.
What is microblogging?
Well, microblogging is described by the Upland blog as follows;
“Microblogs are shorter form blogs, which allow users to exchange small elements of content such as single sentences, individual images, or video links.”
Since the new age of multimodality, these messages can also be posted with the use of audio, text and hyperlinks.
Reasons To Become a Microbloggers
- Efficient Marketing
Microblogging allows users to share shorter marketing messages with more succinct information. Within traditional forms of blogging, users tend to publish long stories with detailed information, statistics, facts and pictures. This tactic has been effective for some readers, however when you come across users that just want basic information, it is generally better to create short texts in order to engage and get your message across.
2. Connections
In the world of microblogging and social media, you can use hashtags and mentions to contact and build relationships with other people and brands. This environment of constant connections can help bloggers broaden and spread the outreach of their messages.
3. Education
Microblogging is a great way to seek information and to also educate others with the knowledge and skills that you have learnt. The process of addressing different questions lets your platform become an environment for learning.
Top Tips on Becoming a Successful Microblogger
Here are some top tips extracted from Michiel Mulders blog which will help you to fine tune your skills and engage with your audience.
- Keep your content succinct
Instead of putting in huge paragraphs and chunks of information, break up the texts into smaller sections or use bullet points to allow your content to read easily and plainly. Another common technique to use is emojis as many social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn can’t use subheadings.
Here is an example of a microblogger splitting their content into easily digestible sections with the use of emojis. spacing and imagery;
2. Humour
If you can use humour in your microblogging posts then you can potentially unlock a great technique to engage with your audience. This has been used by brands such as Domino’s who use gifs, emojis and memes to interact with their users which drives up engagement with their products.
3. Use Anecdotes
Anecdotes are a great way to add context to your posts, particularly on Instagram or Twitter where captioning interesting personal stories or experiences can directly improve user engagement.
In the example post below, there is a photograph of a man outside of the Kedarnath Temple in India. Without viewing the caption, this doesn’t have much meaning to it however @vishuddhadas uses microblogging of to add context and to construct meaning behind the image.
The importance of providing context is that microbloggers tend to follow people for particular reasons. In this case, Vishuddha is followed by users because of his travel content and spiritual advice which requires these captions to supplement the images.
Summary
Hopefully you have seen the power that microblogging has for today and for the future, I think it is a popular and effective way to communicate and inspire our generation.
So, there isn’t really much else to say apart from keep working hard, study your audience and then curate your content so that your followers can fall in love with your posts and then let them create meaning to their lives.
