Throughout this year, I’m using Twitter to keep track of every time I subscribe to a new blog or podcast.
Normally when I find a new blog, I just simply subscribe to the blog—either by email signup, or by adding the blog to my Feedly reader. Boom. Done. But now when I subscribe, I’m also going to tweet about it.
4 reasons why it be fun to publicly tweet when you sign up for a blog
1. You are sharing new discoveries with your followers
If you take the time to subscribe to a new blog, that blog has got to be pretty good, right? Take that value and share it with people you read your site. It’s the basic gist of Twitter—sharing interesting things.
2. Sharing an inside scoop
Whenever you reveal that you are following a particular blog, it’s like you are revealing one of your sources for inspiration. I often wonder what blogs people read.
15 years ago we had blogrolls where people listed the blogs they read. Now we don’t really have that. Instead we have social media where you can see all the people someone follows. But really, that can be hundreds or thousands of people.
With blogs, people don’t realistically follow thousands of blogs. What are the blogs people do read? Here you are giving your followers a little bit of a look-behind-the-scenes.
3. You are encouraging the blogger that you are following
Bloggers are certainly happy to see more people subscribing to their blog. Increasing subscription numbers is always encouraging!
Take the encouragement to the next level by sharing their blog with others.
4. You have a record when you signed up.
I don’t really know what value this brings of knowing your signup date. But hey, it’s on record some place.
Using Twitter threads instead of loose tweets
You could just tweet away every time you start following a blog. Just loose simple tweets. But you can also organize these tweets by tweeting them all in one Twitter thread. Make one “master” tweet, and then put all your updates under that one tweet.
This year I started off with a “master” tweet like this:
And now whenever I subscribe to a new blog, I go back to this tweet, and write a reply. If you click through on the master tweet, you’ll see the new blogs I’m following in the replies.
Use Twitter threads to share new podcasts you follow
You can do the same technique when you subscribe to a new podcast. Here’s my “master” tweet and replies for podcast subscriptions:
It’ll be fun to see these Twitter threads grow over the year.