Can your Twitter account turn a hobby into a career?

Whether it be blogging, vlogging, making music or creating your own business, we’ve all heard about the newly invented phenomena of certain individuals earning the title ‘internet famous’. But the real question is how did they acquire this level of success and how can you gain it too? How did these ordinary people manage to create a following of around 1 million people to anywhere up to 15 million?

Obviously personal traits (such as being hard-working, being dedicated and being able to persevere) need to be accredited to success, but social media plays a huge role in the path to creating a buzz around your online hobby.

For the purpose of leaving this list at a reasonable word count, I am going to use the example of creating a successful blog in the below tips, but they are applicable to any website you are trying to enhance.

Without further ado, in no particular order, here are the top five points to have social media help transform your hobby into a career: 

Grow your Twitter audience

Before you create a Twitter account, make sure you have content already as nobody wants to be enticed into clicking onto a blog page that's as empty as a student’s bank account!

Once you have a few posts up and running, create a Twitter account. The way to begin your growth in audience is to search for a few blogs that are similar to your own and follow them. For example, if you are writing a blog about travelling, follow other travel blogs. This will get you noticed in the blogging community and the word will begin spreading about YOUR posts.

Interact with key individuals 

Key individuals can mean a diverse range of people, but put simple, they're people interested in your blog. They can be other bloggers, industry experts and just ordinary people with an interest in what you’re writing about. Make sure you regularly interact and develop relationships them because when it comes down to it, they will choose your blog to read first if they feel like they know you personally.

If you develop relationships with industry experts they're more likely to promote your blog if you've developed a friendly relationship.

Relationships are key when starting out so make sure not to underestimate the power of old- fashioned techniques evolving in a modern world. World of mouth (or word of tweets and status updates nowadays) can still be one of the most effective ways to get people talking about your website.

Write great content

It's all well and good growing an audience to share your hobby, but you need to provide good content for them to returning and to share your posts with others. Tweeting about your new post will generate a few clicks to your blog, but great content will ensure people are coming back to your posts on their own, without little nudges from you.

Interesting, well researched content will create loyal, regular followers for you who also share your posts with their followers and friends.

Hashtags and directing tweets

Hashtags are searchable on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr etc. so make sure you use hashtags that are searched often. Using general hashtags that are popular to search (such as #beautytips, #holiday and #bloggerswanted) will make your blog viewable to many people that may have not found it before.

Hashtags are a great way of getting your social media posts out in the open to be seen by new potential followers and also a great way of telling these followers what many of your posts will be based around.

For example:

NEW UPLOAD: Hair Growth Treatments. http://t.co/FF5RX19bYx @TheBlogGuideRT @FemaleBloggerRT #longhair #bbloggers
— Charlotte (@BeautyandBolder) August 23, 2014

With this tweet, many people now know that I am a beauty blogger and will be posting regularly about beauty products, reviews and tips. Also, directing tweets to specific people and companies can be a good way to boost the buzz around your blog. If you tweet people with a higher following than yours, they will reply or retweet your tweet and you will get noticed by their following.

This is the same for companies but usually with a much larger following than individuals – sometimes with a following into the millions. This kind of promotion can give your blog the boost it needs to gain a large following and for you to be able to make your hobby into a career.

Show individuality in your social media channel

You will lose followers if you spam people’s newsfeeds with persistent begging tweets. You have to put across your individual personality with your feed so you are personable and approachable. Showing yourself to be a three dimensional person in the sometimes-restricting platform of social media is imperative to get through to your audience and create a loyal following.

People will prefer to promote a real person behind a good blog instead of an annoying spammer.

If you follow the above points, your following WILL grow. But above else, you must believe in the snowball effect. A small snowball rolling down a hill grows until it is huge and has collected a large amount of snow to attach to itself. The pickup of people noticing your hobby will start slowly but the longer time you dedicate to growing your following and creating great content, the bigger the following you will attract.

Anything worth having takes time and effort, so patience is key to turning your hobby into a career.

Good luck! :)

By Charlotte A’ Court of Beauty and Bolder

Image: Doug8888/flickr