Medalist Athlete Branding Guide

Give a second life to your aging blog posts to resonate with your audience and grow your website's traffic.

So, you’ve written an amazing blog post and you shared it. A week or so have passed. Now what? It's inevitable, your post is not getting love anymore even if probably still makes for a great Sunday read. 

Feeling bad for your beloved post? Fear not. There is a way to properly recycle your aging articles. They may not be new but if they are still relevant, they might qualify for the Rapid Fire Tweeting Tactic ( conveniently shrunk to RFTT for short). 

For example, a blog post on post race recovery or on the art of traveling would be perfect for this kind of practice. 

The idea of RFTT is to repeatedly promote your blog posts using scheduled tweets. However, there's a twist to it: rather than blatantly ask your followers to read your blog post over and over again, you extract inspiring snippets from your post to craft unique and engaging tweets.

By sharing a number of thoughtful tweets linking to the same URL, you’re proportionally increasing its reach and effectively growing traffic to it.

Here comes Buffer

As expected, sharing a dozen tweets would rather be a hassle. Queue the Buffer App. Buffer is a pretty neat sharing tool. Amongst other things, it allows you to schedule your social updates. And it’s free.

Getting started with Buffer is dead simple. Head over to bufferapp.com, connect your social account and that’s it. 

Crafting a sharing schedule isn't hard either. Here’s how we do it: every other day, at 11:54 AM. 

If you’re wondering why every other day? It’s simply to avoid being totally annoying.

Why 11:54 AM? Because assuming our main follower base is in North America, it's right before lunch on the East Coast and right before 9:00AM on the West Coast.

*Disclaimers and Warnings*

There is a fine line between deceiving your audience with artificially pre-composed tweets and engaging them with pre-composed tweets. Don't lure your followers into thinking your tweeting in the heat of the moment when in fact your clever blurb was written a week ago.

It’s also worth mentioning that Buffer is made for marketing ninjas bombarding their brand’s Twitter feed in an attempt to achieve "social growth to boost sales". We're athletes, not marketers. Stay true to yourself.

Pace yourself. Frequency is an important variable here. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience and eventually piss them off with RFTT. Play the long game here and set your automated tweet every other day. That way you’ll be able to build up a queue that won’t interfere with your regular tweeting habits. 

Use a bulletproof structure

The best way to achieve a successful RFTT campaign is by tweeting engaging snippets from your post to tease your audience. You’ll generally want to adopt the following structure:

quote + link + @mention 

Use @mention to leverage somebody else's reach. Get them to RT it and it’ll help you get more exposure than you’d usually get from your own audience and hopefully get you a handful of new followers in the process.

Craft unique and insightful tweets

Now that you’re all set with Buffer, it’s time to harvest your blog post of its hidden gems and turn them into tweets. 

Take a couple minutes every week to skim through your back catalog of posts from the past couple months and look for post that are still relevant.

For each post you should be able to extract 5-10 highly valuable snippets of information. 

Can’t find anything worthy? Get creative and use the snippets as a blueprint for better crafted quotes. It’s your own words after all, move them around the way you wish.

Measure and repeat

Take time to give a good look at the analytics of your RFTT campaign using Buffer's Analytics.  

The dashboard gives you a clean overview of how well your previous tweets performed. As you can see, some tweets might get more retweets and as a result a larger audience while others may get more engagement (clicks).