The Short ‘n’ Sweet Tweet – How to get twitter to work in your favour
Hi all,
Hope all is well on your end. I thought I might spend a few moments to present my recent experience and experiments with Twitter.
Twitter is something which has been discussed a lot recently; you can’t find a website these days which doesn’t have a twitter link. At 140 characters, there isn’t much space to chat about anything in any real detail. Using Twitter requires the ability to be brief, something most people – including myself – find very difficult. As Mark Twain once wrote, “I don’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead”
But this is a good thing. Look at it this way, advertising boards and TV commercials have to deliver a powerful, attention grabbing and convincing appeal within the space of just a few moments. Even Powerpoint presentations, of which I have presented many, have to be concise. Too wordy and you lose your audience.
Amongst the Indie Author community, twitter is a quick and simple way of telling the world about their latest novels. On average, I would say that I tweet a direct link to my novel once every 3-4 days (more if I have promotion running), some Indies fire a tweet about their work 3-4 times per day. This is far too many, even once every 3-4 days is too many if you say nothing between adverts. So how do we fill the gaps?
Answer: BE HUMAN.
Personally, I enjoy hunting the Fortean news, Youtube and even online newspapers for funny, spooky, bizarre and mysterious news and videos. For instance, the NSA director had a Star Trek style war room built – ohhh that was an instant tweet along with a very simple line. “#NSA #SCIFI #STARTREK If you had the cash you would too!”
Why? I hear you ask. The majority of my work is about the supernatural and science fiction. The people I want to connect with love scouring the net for #UFO, #GHOST, #SCIFI to name but a few. The number of retweets and additional followers I have had, especially after finding a UFO video, is actually impressive. Significant more than if I had spent all that time tweeting “Buy my book”.
Then, there is what you have to say. Again, harping on about your book is not likely to get you many sales. Directing your audience to your own blog/articles, actually tells your followers that you are a person and have something more to say than “Buy my book”.
Okay, so now you are telling people about you, your interests and developing a rapport with your followers and we haven’t even discussed using Twitter to promote your book directly. How about this for a radical thought, perhaps you could retweet things other people have written which you find relevant, funny or creepy. Why? Because you are telling people that you listen and find them interesting.
Anyway, now we are onto publicising your novel. You can’t write your synopsis and publicise your novel in a single tweet, or can you? This is the structure I like to adopt.
Relevant Hashtag x3 / Novel Name / “by” / twitter name / Synopsis or tag / short url / additional info + relevant twitter names
Looks simple doesn’t it? But 140 characters? Okay, watch and learn
“#Paranormal #thriller #ebook. Dispatchers by @doc_lamb. Vengeance will be Unleashed. http://bookShow.me/B00BNJAW6E. Cover by @sandra_giles”
Now let’s just dissect this tweet.
1. The searchable hashtags - Paranormal thriller ebook – the category of the novel. Paranormal is a popular subject, thriller is descriptive of the type of novel and ebook is the availability.
2. Dispatchers by @doc_lamb. Pretty much self-explanatory although Dispatchers is only part of the title. Dispatchers – Vengeance of the Dark is a little long for most tweets. I could have used the full title but then I would have to sacrifice a portion of the tweet.
3. “Vengeance will be Unleashed” is one of the many tag lines I have come up with for Dispatchers. It also happens to be one of the twitter friendly short tag lines.
4. http://bookshow.me/B00BNJAW6E is my preferred short URL. This is notably longer than most short URLs, however, bookshow.me is a UNIVERSAL amazon book link. I’ve found most short URLs point to amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, etc. For me, this is a waste of time, I am about to tweet a link to a GLOBAL audience. The number of tweets I have seen for a book promotion leading to a novel I cannot download immediately because I have a Amazon.co.uk account (being UK) and not an Amazon.com (US). REMEMBER – GLOBAL AUDIENCE.
5. Cover by @Sandra_Giles. Sandra did my cover for me and she wants to create covers full-time. By acknowledging her, she is happy to retweet to her audience as an example of her work. This works other ways too, edited by @.. or 5 star review by @.. etc.
So we have a tweet which contains a searchable hashtag, a title, an author, a tagline, a UNIVERSAL Link and an acknowledgement. Plus we have 9 additional characters to spare. I could have additional hashtags in there with 9 characters spare… #kindle perhaps.
All in all, my followers have increased significantly my reach has improved vastly from when I started. I have also noticed an increase in downloads thanks to social media presence.
Experiment with your tweets and remember twitter is there to connect not to bark at people. In my various blogs and forum entries, I perpetually point out that you cannot sell a book by barking at people. You have to find an audience and converse with them about things which they find relevant. An audience must be earned.
Twitter is a powerful tool, but only if you use it right!
Andrew Lamb is the author of the paranormal thriller series “Dispatchers” - http://bookshow.me/B00BNJAW6E and the comedy horror short, “Faulker Surprise” – http://Bookshow.me/B00BNK9ZY8 . Both available through Amazon.
Twitter @doc_lamb www.facebook.com/dispatchersspectral
Dispatchers Vengeance of the Dark
Hope all is well on your end. I thought I might spend a few moments to present my recent experience and experiments with Twitter.
Twitter is something which has been discussed a lot recently; you can’t find a website these days which doesn’t have a twitter link. At 140 characters, there isn’t much space to chat about anything in any real detail. Using Twitter requires the ability to be brief, something most people – including myself – find very difficult. As Mark Twain once wrote, “I don’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead”
But this is a good thing. Look at it this way, advertising boards and TV commercials have to deliver a powerful, attention grabbing and convincing appeal within the space of just a few moments. Even Powerpoint presentations, of which I have presented many, have to be concise. Too wordy and you lose your audience.
Amongst the Indie Author community, twitter is a quick and simple way of telling the world about their latest novels. On average, I would say that I tweet a direct link to my novel once every 3-4 days (more if I have promotion running), some Indies fire a tweet about their work 3-4 times per day. This is far too many, even once every 3-4 days is too many if you say nothing between adverts. So how do we fill the gaps?
Answer: BE HUMAN.
Personally, I enjoy hunting the Fortean news, Youtube and even online newspapers for funny, spooky, bizarre and mysterious news and videos. For instance, the NSA director had a Star Trek style war room built – ohhh that was an instant tweet along with a very simple line. “#NSA #SCIFI #STARTREK If you had the cash you would too!”
Why? I hear you ask. The majority of my work is about the supernatural and science fiction. The people I want to connect with love scouring the net for #UFO, #GHOST, #SCIFI to name but a few. The number of retweets and additional followers I have had, especially after finding a UFO video, is actually impressive. Significant more than if I had spent all that time tweeting “Buy my book”.
Then, there is what you have to say. Again, harping on about your book is not likely to get you many sales. Directing your audience to your own blog/articles, actually tells your followers that you are a person and have something more to say than “Buy my book”.
Okay, so now you are telling people about you, your interests and developing a rapport with your followers and we haven’t even discussed using Twitter to promote your book directly. How about this for a radical thought, perhaps you could retweet things other people have written which you find relevant, funny or creepy. Why? Because you are telling people that you listen and find them interesting.
Anyway, now we are onto publicising your novel. You can’t write your synopsis and publicise your novel in a single tweet, or can you? This is the structure I like to adopt.
Relevant Hashtag x3 / Novel Name / “by” / twitter name / Synopsis or tag / short url / additional info + relevant twitter names
Looks simple doesn’t it? But 140 characters? Okay, watch and learn
“#Paranormal #thriller #ebook. Dispatchers by @doc_lamb. Vengeance will be Unleashed. http://bookShow.me/B00BNJAW6E. Cover by @sandra_giles”
Now let’s just dissect this tweet.
1. The searchable hashtags - Paranormal thriller ebook – the category of the novel. Paranormal is a popular subject, thriller is descriptive of the type of novel and ebook is the availability.
2. Dispatchers by @doc_lamb. Pretty much self-explanatory although Dispatchers is only part of the title. Dispatchers – Vengeance of the Dark is a little long for most tweets. I could have used the full title but then I would have to sacrifice a portion of the tweet.
3. “Vengeance will be Unleashed” is one of the many tag lines I have come up with for Dispatchers. It also happens to be one of the twitter friendly short tag lines.
4. http://bookshow.me/B00BNJAW6E is my preferred short URL. This is notably longer than most short URLs, however, bookshow.me is a UNIVERSAL amazon book link. I’ve found most short URLs point to amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, etc. For me, this is a waste of time, I am about to tweet a link to a GLOBAL audience. The number of tweets I have seen for a book promotion leading to a novel I cannot download immediately because I have a Amazon.co.uk account (being UK) and not an Amazon.com (US). REMEMBER – GLOBAL AUDIENCE.
5. Cover by @Sandra_Giles. Sandra did my cover for me and she wants to create covers full-time. By acknowledging her, she is happy to retweet to her audience as an example of her work. This works other ways too, edited by @.. or 5 star review by @.. etc.
So we have a tweet which contains a searchable hashtag, a title, an author, a tagline, a UNIVERSAL Link and an acknowledgement. Plus we have 9 additional characters to spare. I could have additional hashtags in there with 9 characters spare… #kindle perhaps.
All in all, my followers have increased significantly my reach has improved vastly from when I started. I have also noticed an increase in downloads thanks to social media presence.
Experiment with your tweets and remember twitter is there to connect not to bark at people. In my various blogs and forum entries, I perpetually point out that you cannot sell a book by barking at people. You have to find an audience and converse with them about things which they find relevant. An audience must be earned.
Twitter is a powerful tool, but only if you use it right!
Andrew Lamb is the author of the paranormal thriller series “Dispatchers” - http://bookshow.me/B00BNJAW6E and the comedy horror short, “Faulker Surprise” – http://Bookshow.me/B00BNK9ZY8 . Both available through Amazon.
Twitter @doc_lamb www.facebook.com/dispatchersspectral
Dispatchers Vengeance of the Dark
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