Tips on Using Twitter Effectively – Part 1
If you've been on the web for longer than five minutes, you've no doubt heard of this thing called "Twitter," and if you've been on Twitter for longer than five minutes, you've probably been spammed by at least eight hundred "social media gurus" who'll be happy to sell you the "Ancient Chinese Secret For Gaining 100,000 Twitter Followers In A Week and TO MASSIVELY GROW YOUR INCOME AND RELIEVE HEMORRHOID IRRITATION!!!!"
Yeah, whatever.
The reason you should care about Twitter is that you can, at least based on my experience, use it very effectively to help promote your books and your author persona – if you do it right. I'm not claiming I've got the whole thing pinned down (I'm trying to learn new tricks all the time), but of all the tools in my promotional toolbox, I think my highest "skill rating" and return on investment is currently with Twitter.
While I don't have statistics to back it up, I believe that the rapid success enjoyed by SEASON OF THE HARVEST after its release (and I didn't do any big lead-up fanfare anywhere) that landed it on several Amazon Bestseller lists – along with – is due directly to my promotional efforts on Twitter. I also believe that the continued success of those books, and the growing success of the others, is due largely to Twitter.
So, Twitter is a tool – just one tool – but like any other, if you learn how to use it and use it for the right kind of job, it can be very powerful.
Before we get down to the nitty gritty, let's first come to grips with what Twitter is. I found a nice definition of it in the PCMag.com encyclopedia:
A very popular instant messaging system that lets a person send brief text messages up to 140 characters in length to a list of followers. Launched in 2006, Twitter was designed as a social network to keep friends and colleagues informed throughout the day. However, it became widely used for commercial and political purposes to keep customers, voters and fans up-to-date as well as to encourage feedback.
The biggest point to take away here is that "tweets" are SHORT: only 140 characters. That sounds like a lot, but it's not very much at all.
To give you an idea, those two short sentences total 138 characters, if I counted right (and I suck at counting, so don't hold me to it!).
"Holy cow!" you exclaim. "How can I possibly say anything important in 140 characters??"
True, you're not going to be able to cram War and Peace into those 140 characters, but if you learn to not be a gasbag (which is incredibly difficult for me!), you can say a lot in that amount of space. It's not really hard, but it does take some getting used to.
Another thing you have to get your brain around is the concept of "following" and "follower". Followers are people who are following you; "following" means you're following them. Each way is voluntary, so you can follow someone but they don't have to follow you back, and vice versa, and you can unfollow someone any time you want (and vice versa). When you follow someone, you see their tweets in your timeline; they'll only see yours in their timeline if they're following you. There's also an option to block people, which means that their tweets won't appear in your timeline, your tweets won't appear in theirs (even if they're trying to follow you), and they're, well, blocked. I use this mostly for the social media guru spammers or anybody else that I really don't want to have anything to do with.
The most important thing, however, is to start using it, and then use it consistently. And by consistently, I mean every day, intermittently throughout the day. Twitter is a very "non-persistent" environment, and if you're not in there chatting away every day, making your little dent in the Twitterverse, you're not going to get much traction out of it. I'll show you ways of how to do that effectively without sucking up a huge amount of time, but I wanted to plant that in your brain right up front, because if the persistent/consistent thing won't work for you, then Twitter is probably not going to be an effective promotional tool for you (that's okay, by the way – different tools for different needs!).
Okay, so, let's start from ground zero:
Set up a Twitter account . It's free and easy. I STRONGLY recommend that you have a photo of yourself to use as an avatar – something that you feel is a good reflection of yourself. It could also be a book cover, but I personally think the "human face" is better. Choose a user name that is easy, maybe catchy, and again, is a reflection of your author persona. I chose KreelanWarrior as a spin from the IN HER NAME series of books. Make sure you link to your blog or web site (you MUST HAVE ONE! I'll send Sasha the cat to bite your toes if you don't!). For the Twitter settings, you can adjust them as you like, but one I highly recommend you check is "email when someone starts following me" so you'll know when you have a new follower. This will be important for interaction and pruning, which we'll get to later. I also recommend that you do at least minimal customization of your profile page, which is easy in Twitter's interface, just so yours doesn't look like the default. Try to stand out from the crowd a bit, okay?
While Twitter's interface is okay, you need something better. There are a bunch of alternatives out there, but my personal favorite is Hootsuite . Hootsuite has a bunch of features that make interacting with and sorting through your followers and folks you're following much easier. It also allows you to integrate with other social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, so you can post something once and send it to multiple channels. While I'll cover a few specifics later, I'm not going to go into the basic details of how to use Hootsuite, as there's a lot to cover and there are some great Hootsuite tutorials on YouTube. And if you have a smart phone like an iPhone, make sure you get the Hootsuite app so you can tweet on the go!
Get an account on Klout . This this is a great source of trend information on the growth of your following and the effectiveness of your interactions. Looking at the stats and the detailed analysis will help give you a clue about whether you're doing things right or not.
Get an account on ManageFlitter . This site has a variety of services and options, but the only thing I use it for is to find people I'm following who haven't been active on Twitter in the last 30 days or longer, with a utility to bulk unfollow them. This is VERY IMPORTANT when you're close to following 2,000 people. Why? Because that's a trip-wire in Twitter where they start enforcing a following to follower ratio of 1.1 to 1. What that means is that you can't follow a bunch of people unless there's an almost-as-big bunch of people following you. So once you're following 2,000 people, you can't follow any more until at least 1818 are following you (2000 to 1818 = 1.1 to 1). And one way to keep this ratio as trim as possible is to weed out any folks you're following who aren't actively using Twitter. If they haven't tweeted in 30 days, zap 'em. You want to engage people who are actively yakking on Twitter, not just collect a bunch of hollow accounts.
Another awesome tool I recently discovered, thanks to Kirkus MacGowan, was TwitCleaner. This really helps you zoom in on the folks you're following who are just broadcasting links, who don't interact with anyone, or who are engaged in otherwise unhelpful (to you or anyone else) Twitter behavior. You'll have to experiment a little with it to see what your threshold is for who you might want to zap, but this is definitely a little gem that you should take a look at.
There are lots of other Twitter tools out there, but those are the ones I use most often. Do a google search for "twitter tools" and play around with ones that catch your eye.
That brings us to your homework for the week: set up those accounts, look at the tutorials and learn the very basics of how to use Twitter and Hootesuite, search for and play with other Twitter tools, and START TWEETING! If you're new to Twitter, don't even worry right now about tweeting about your books – just tweet about whatever you're doing right now (well, unless you're sitting on the pot – we probably don't need to know that, hey?).
And don't worry about finding followers right now: go to my profile, click the "follow" button, then give me a shout. Copy and paste this into the "What's Happening" box in Twitter if you like, then hit return to tweet it: "Hey, @kreelanwarrior, I read your Twitter intro blog post and am wondering what to do now?" and I'll follow you back.
Then we'll go from there…
For more information on promoting your books, check out THE PATH TO SELF-PUBLISHING SUCCESS!
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