Farewell to Feed140, now tend to your evergreens

Evergreen content is a boon for social media. If you write a blog post that is interesting or useful for your target audience in perpetuity (or at least for a good while) then it is sensible and reasonable to reuse that content. Like a plant that doesn't shed its leaves during winter (e.g. laurel, holly, most conifers), such content can be called evergreen. I have several writing and social media posts on this blog that have generated a lot of traffic over the last few years and, in the main, they're of the evergreen variety. So it makes sense to nudge a potential audience towards those posts with e.g. Twitter. One tweet a day helps point people in the right direction and, if the tweets are numerous enough and carefully worded, why not recycle them?
I have a list of around sixty tweets which I run sequentially out of my @Ruby_Barnes Twitter account. Or at least I did, until recently. I used an app called Feed140 which allowed me to upload a playlist of tweets and schedule them for release. I loved Feed140 for its simplicity but, alas, it is no more. Kudos to Doug Hudiberg for his work with Feed140. I'm sorry it didn't work out and I wish you all the best for the future. Now I'm going to have to delve into another app for scheduling my evergreen content tweets. I liked Feed140 so much as it was an app rather than a program. Now looking for a suitable replacement.

Tweet dreams are made of this

So you want to know how to keep your blog content alive, re-use your twitter microblog moments of glory and broaden your social media reach? Bear with me, I'm going to take you off on a hygiene products tangent.

You're walking down a corridor at work, a hotel lobby for an event, the final few steps to the wine bar for a date. Did you remember to put on anti-perspirant deodorant? Doesn't matter, you're cool. But now you start to worry about whether you forgot to put it on and the sweat begins. Even if you put it on now it would be too late. What's that odour? Body or fear? That's how I feel about all the things I have to do to keep my social media platform running. I've forgotten something essential, my weaknesses (social armpits) are exposed and the strange smell in the room is me. How can I keep things sweet, make sure the toilet paper is hanging the right way everywhere I go and maintain my sanity with everything else going on?

Social media fads come and go. Remember MySpace? A few months ago Google+ was going to be the next sweet little number. Since its flotation the predicted demise of Facebook has had people scrabbling for footholds on Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon and goodness knows where else. Everything is a whirling blur of social networks, blogs, photo collections, discussion forums, online chat and update feeds.

How about Twitter? What is the point of a 140 character message which might not get read by anyone before it sinks into the 340 million daily tweets? Maybe you use it for a kind of global chat. Are you a microflash wizard who gets favorited every five minutes and manages to send tweets viral? Twitter doesn't seem to offer much to those of us mortals who don't have spare hours to follow the streams of consciousness. Unless you're a blogger.

Content is the key to good blogging. Some folk blog about their routine daily life, others about a book release, product review or maybe a competition. Authors engage in round-robin writing challenges, give updates on their WIP and share writing tips. People tend to follow or bookmark the blog if the content has value for the reader: well written, entertaining and pertinent. They skim and immediately forget uninspired posts.

Is twitter driving you demented?

I have a guest post today over on Sweet Louise Wise's blog.

It describes how Feed140 and Triberr can help you regain your sanity in the world of blogging and twitter.

Please go on over and have a gander / butcher's ;-)

http://www.louisewise.com/2012/09/is-twitter-driving-you-demented.html#.UFrwx67neSq

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