Twitter 101

One of the main tools I use to gain readers is Twitter. It’s a great resource for writers.

When my book went live on Amazon, I had 17 followers. I now have 7000, a little over a year later.

If you are starting off from scratch, I suggest you use your writer’s name as your twitter username, or your name + author if it’s not available. Go to Twitter.com and build a profile. Be certain to upload a nice headshot or your book cover.

Include a short bio that mentions what your connection is to writing, as well as a link to your blogspot and to your books. Keep this short. It makes it easier for people to recommend you on Twitter. Add a little spice or humor to make it pop. You’re a writer – you can do it.

As an example, here is mine:

Wrestling words and laundry. Author of The Crown Phoenix #Steampunk series. http://amzn.to/ADeLucaAuthorCentral

The next step is to get a boatload of followers.

I built a following by participating in #WW or #WriterWednesday, and #FF or  #FollowFriday. If you put some of your followers’ names in a tweet and add those hashtags, they will do the same for you. They’ll know you have done that because they will click on the @Mentions, which will bring up all the tweets with their names in them.

At a certain point the following will just start building on its own, especially if you take the time to say thank you to every new follower. Tell them that you’ll check out their links or blogs, if they have one in their profiles, and do so. They’ll check yours out as well.

You can do the same thing in Twitter. Click on @Connect after you have been on for a few days and you’ll see who has mentioned you in a tweet. Tweet them back and say thank you. That gets both of your names out there even more.

That brings us to the magic RT, or retweet. If someone puts up a mention of a book or a blog in a tweet, be certain to retweet it for them. Do it often enough, and you’ll pick up a lot of thank yous. When you put up a blog or book link, people will do the same for you.

While all of this is going on, be certain to tweet about funny thing that happen to you, random thoughts as a writer, snippets from your day – fun things to read. If you go overboard with the marketing and retweets and #FF’s, your tweet list will look like one sea of red links, and you won’t get as many followers. Who wants to get in touch with someone who talks like an infomercial all the time?

If you want to take it to the next level, try to think of something special you can tweet every day, like pirate jokes or silly haikus.

The more time you spend on Twitter, the more followers you will get. Don’t let it take over your life, though. You have books and blogs to write after all. About 20 minutes a day, twice a day, is plenty of time.

Which brings us back to that blog link you put into your profile. Remember how you told new followers that you would check out their links? And how you did? And how you liked some of them enough to follow their blogs so you could read them each week?

Some of your new followers will be doing that to you as well. Through the use of Twitter, you will increase your blog readership. This is how social media will begin bleed over across formats, in a good way.

Not only that, but as you look at your new followers’ blogs and read their tweets, you’ll find new opportunities. There are writers out there looking for guest bloggers and people to interview and books to feature. They might as well feature your book.

You want to keep quality as well as quantity in mind when you start to gather followers. If you randomly follow everyone you see in tweets, then at some point you will be following 2000 people. Twitter caps you at that level, until you have over 2000 followers yourself.

There are ways to get to that level. First, try to keep a balance between people followed and followers. Those numbers should be very close to each other.

(You can purge nonfollowers by going to justunfollow.com or to http://manageflitter.com/. Log in through twitter and those sites will show you who isn’t following you back. You can unfollow them with a click of your mouse.)

With Twitter capping you at 2000, you can’t afford to follow everyone. Make certain that the people you follow are human and not ‘bots (you can tell by looking at their tweets, which come up in their profiles) and that they aren’t just tweeting about their home carpet cleaning business. You need them to participate in your marketing, not just to concentrate on their start up company.

You can follow up to 500 people a day. If you rotate following people who are interested in books, your genre, and publishing, and unfollow an equal number of those who aren’t following back through manageflitter, you’ll notice a sharp increase in your followers.

Now, to the tweet itself. You only have 140 characters to tweet in. You’ll need to shorten some of those long links you want to tweet, such as Amazon and blog links. You can do that at bit.ly, or at a host of other shortening sites. I like Bit.ly because it stores your shortened links and copies them to your clipboard when you need them again. Plus you can customize your links and track them to see how many people have clicked on them.

If you tweet short links and snippets of information, and if you retweet other followers’ tweets, then your tweets will get retweeted. That’s important, because your info will:

A) go out to a much larger, everwidening audience
B) continue to appear on twitter even after you stop tweeting
C) win you more followers

As a final tip, on #WW (Writer Wednesday) I feature a few select friends, instead of long lists of @writername and @whoosis.  Here’s an example:

#WW @danielleraver - She’s funny, talented, and a tech whiz. Her #fantasy book Brother, Betrayed is at http://amzn.to/BrotherUS

You can do a recommendation like that right from followfridayhelper.com.

A recommendation like the one I wrote about Danielle like that gets a lot of attention -  more than strings of @writernames, and the people I mention in those tweets get a real kick out of it.

The problem with Twitter is that it is very fast-moving. A tweet comes and goes in an instant. Marking a tweet with a hashtag like #MyWANA #Fantasy or #romance puts your tweet in a specialized list that other people will access.

Another way to get around that immediacy is to schedule tweets to appear at regular intervals. You can do that on Hootsuite, right on line, or on Tweetdeck, which you download and install. Both have several amazing features, such as the ability to sort several groups of hashtags at once.

In my opinion, being classy, having a thick skin, and respecting the other authors out there will get you a lot further in the Tweetiverse than any automatic Followback app. But I think that’s true of most of the aspects of being a writer.

One writer, who is publishing the male version of Pride and Prejudice, holds regular "balls" on Friday nights. He tweets to followers under the hashtag #DarcyBall ; they check in and speak Austenese. Once you have enough followers you can do the same kind of thing, tailored for your book.

The sources that taught me the most about Twitter can be found here:

http://www.molly-greene.com/0-4000-in-a-snap-how-to-build-a-quality-twitter-following-fast/

and here:

http://www.livewritethrive.com/2012/06/11/coming-clean-about-my-twitter-success/

Twitter Party - Millicent Marie Tour

Today is the day - the official launch of Millicent Marie is NOT my Name by Karen Pokras Toz! To kick things off you are invited to a Twitter Party. Join award winning children's author Karen Pokras Toz at 10 am, 11, am, and Noon EST and then again at 10 pm, 11 pm, and Midnight EST for 30 minutes of chatting, fun, and prizes.

The easiest way to join the conversation is with tweetchat.com Login with your Twitter account, then enter #MillicentMarie to join the room.

The Twitter Party is just the beginning of the fun. Karen will be on tour for the next 21 days. Check out the full schedule here.

Summary:
Twelve-year-old Millicent Marie does not like her name. After all, she was named for a woman who died more than fifty years ago and was not the most loveable member of the Harris family. Her friends call her Millie, but when she writes in her diary she refers to herself as Amanda – the name she always wished she had.

When Millie’s younger brother finds her diary on her computer, he decides to publish it as a blog for the entire world to see, including the boy Millie has a crush on. In the midst of all the mayhem, Millie/Amanda discovers she is suddenly Springside Elementary’s most sought after sixth-grade mystery gossip and advice columnist.

But not all is fun and games, as Millie quickly learns, once she realizes feelings are at stake. Nobody, least of all Millie, expects things to turn out as they do in this tale of friendship and respect.

Learn more & get your own copy (ebook and paperback):  

Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, Amazon

 
About Karen Pokras Toz:
Karen Pokras Toz is a writer, wife and mom. Karen grew up in Connecticut and currently lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and three children. In June 2011, Karen published her first middle grade children’s novel for 7-12 year olds called Nate Rocks the World, which won First Place for Children’s Chapter Books and the Grand Prize Overall in the 2012 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards, as well as placing first for a Global E-Book Award for Pre-Teen Literature. In 2012, Karen published the second in the Nate Rocks series, Nate Rocks the Boat, followed by middle grade novel, Millicent Marie Is Not My Name. Karen is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI).

Follow the tour on Pinterest and don't forget to check out Millie's blog.

Hootsuite and Tweetdeck - Those Damn Birds

Yesterday I read a post from a publishing blogger that I really admire. In her blog, she talked about how tired she was of reading a stream of spam, especially in a place she had created on Twitter for writers to meet and greet and help each other.

She really was upset about tweets sent via TweetDeck and Hootsuite. If you don't know these apps, these are services that let you schedule tweets in advance, for weeks at a time, to go out over the waves.

Writers, myself included, are guilty of sending out loads of prepackaged tweets, hoping to garner new readers with our perfects composed tweets.

Now, this blogger, who I completely admire, said that doing this is like stating, "I am going to send you content, but I don't care what your response is. Because I am not here at this time; a bot is sending out my tweets."

And she's right. If you hop on Twitter, there are tweets after tweets that are nothing by links to where to buy a book.

Does that mean, though, that Tweetdeck is completely useless?

For one thing, the service can help me read my tweets. I can sort incoming messages by subjects I'm interested in (books, publishing, parenthood, steampunk) so I can read what people have to say. 

But I also believe that there is a way to schedule tweets and do so without losing our personalities in the process.

Don't hate me just yet - read on.

First, I schedule tweets for readers who are in different time zones than I am. My tweet to someone in Australia might not get picked up if I send it now, but if I schedule it for 2AM there's a better chance they'll see it. 

Heck, I can contact regular people this way too. They say the best time to send stuff is from 10 pm - 11 pm. Guess what? I'm hormonal - I'm asleep by then. I need to schedule.

HOWEVER, my blogger mentor / muse is right. If I simply schedule spam for those times, then I am guilty of being a bot. 

Don't be that guy.

I think that as I schedule posts, I need to include humanity. Instead of a mere link to my book, I need to have a question or a quote - something that includes my Twitter followers and starts a conversation.

And guess what? If they answer my question, I NEED TO RESPOND.  I must do this to prove that I'm not a bot, to make a friend, to be human, for crying out loud.

As well, I must go and read the main stream on Twitter. I've had a lot of people tell me that they have too many Twitter followers to look at the stream. They only look at the interactions page (tweets specifically directed to them.)

I was doing this for a while too, and while I did so, my head jammed in my inbox, my spammy pigheaded bot self send out tweets to the general public with book links. (Confession is good for the soul.)

Well, if we all did this, no one would read our tweets. We'd all be sending out links and checking our own mail, not heeding what other people were saying to the Twitterverse.

So I decided to jump back into the main stream. Now, I read general tweets again. I laugh at some, retweet others, and guess what? There are some tweets out there from writers that make me buy books.

This said, there are those (such as my wonderful publishing mentor) who have specifically requested not to receive book links on their group hashtags. I must, as a human and not a bot, honor that request and only send out links to those who actually want to see them.

My tweets in the past have garnered me readers. I've had responses of, "Thanks so much for telling me about your book! I'm reading it now."

Still, as I said before, my muse has a great point. I must shed the bot and up my humanity game, if I want to hoot my deck, that is.

Welcome to my Interverse

Enter my rocket, and come with me into deep space. In our capsule, we hover over a large galaxy. It has no shape. It's not a spiral, or even a Sombrero Galaxy. It exists, perhaps, in five dimensions.

The Sombrero Galaxy

The atmosphere is, of course, the Clouds - those nuggets of info that rain down at the touch of a button. I'm still learning the strange ways of Clouds.


Underneath lies a huge, sprawling, messy planet, much like Asimov's Trantor. There is the internet, of course, with large sites and blogspots. They grow, dwindle, disappear, reappear in breathtaking fashion and speed.

Trantor

They all interact with the Facebook Ocean and the Twitter River. Transport between sites and the social media waters is instantaneous and constant. Those who learn how to apparate between the two, and those who can set up their own train stations along the way, will get good results.


A map of this planet is ever-changing, ever-growing. There is danger at areas all over the social media waters and the actual nets themselves. Even in the Clouds, I'm sure, we could say, Here There Be Dragons.

Here There Be Dragons

To further confound things, we all have our own version of that planet. Our planets intermingle with other versions. Mine, for example, has a pretty large Twitter river, a somewhat deep Facebook Ocean, and this tiny little blog as a village hub. My LinkedIn continent is represented, at the moment, by mere postcards. MySpace Mountain has fallen off the edge. Goodreads is a bit of a jungle. And sites like Amazon tower over all, meting out rules and punishments at will.


I like to envision my own version of the Interverse. I can see my Twitter river, muddied at times with too much marketing, cleared up with human interaction, and then polluted again when I grow lazy. My little blog village sells its wares and constantly needs to be updated. There are other blog villages to visit in order to keep mine healthy and growing. 


If I look at it like that, in moments of - insanity? - then it's not all so overwhelming. It's my little slice of eternity.

Top 10 Reasons NOT to Post My Junk on the Web

10. I just threw up in my mouth a little bit, and I am certain you did too.

9. I've got laundry to do.

8. When I go to a meeting of the PTO, I don't want the  first image in the minds of parents and principals and vice-principals to be THAT. Especially not the vice principal - she scares me.

7. I'm fifty. Get off my lawn.

6.  My camera started laughing hysterically and shut down by itself. Now it refuses to start up, even if I tempt it with cries of Pretty landscape! Squirrel! or - oh, lord, anything  I type here just suddenly sounds incredibly obscene.

5. Waxing? Hello??!! Let's just not even go there, okay?

4. I just decided to read all of War and Peace, in the  original Russian, instead.

3. ...plus, I hear that  phone books can be folded into cool seasonal figurines, if  you go page by page. Should only take me twenty hours!

2. Did I mention that I'm fifty?

1. I have heard a rumor  that  if you  do that - you know - that thing, then OTHER PEOPLE MAY SEE IT.  I know, crazy, but there it is.

Social Media for Authors, Pt. 1: A New Star in the Twitterverse

Over the next few weeks, some of the authors at FIBP and I will be running a continuing series on how to work social media  to increase your author network and drive traffic to your  blogs. In doing so, that will get more eyes on your book and hopefully drive sales.


Each blog focuses on a particular aspect of the social media network. Today’s post, for example, highlights Twitter as an important portion of your toolkit for reaching readers. We should point out, however, that all forms of networking can interact: Twitter can highlight blog posts, blogging can take readers to sites like Goodreads, and Facebook can be a central hub for it all. In fact, each individual author can design a network that reflects her own marketing goals.

******

When I finished my book,  agents and publishers never called or rang the doorbell. Once I was live on Amazon, the throngs of people clamoring to shell out three clams for my book also failed to materialize. I had to go and get them, one at a time.


One of the main tools I use to do that is Twitter. It’s a great resource for writers - in fact, I would hazard a guess that a lot of tweeps out there are writers.


When I started marketing, I had 17 followers. I now have close to 700, three months later. If you are starting off from scratch,  I suggest you use your writer’s name as your twitter username, or your name + author if it’s not available. Go to Twitter .com and build a profile. Be certain to upload a nice photo – one that looks good humored or that has a bit of sass to it.


Include a short bio that  mentions what your connection is to writing, as well as a link to your blogspot (more on that later.) The next step is to get a whole boatload of followers.


I built a following by participating in #WW or #WriterWednesday, and #FF or  #FollowFriday. If you put some of your followers’  names in a tweet and add those hashtags, they will do the same for  you. They’ll know you have done that because they will click on the @Mentions, which will bring up all the tweets with their names in them.

At a certain point the following will just start building on its own, especially if you take the time to say thank you to every new follower. 


You can do the same thing. Click on @Mentions after you have been on for a few days and you’ll see who has mentioned you in a tweet. Tweet them back and say thank you. That gets both of your names out there even more.


That brings us to the magic RT, or retweet. If someone puts up a mention of a book or a blog in a tweet, be certain to retweet it for them. Do it often enough, and you’ll pick up a lot of thank yous. When you put up a blog or book link, people will do the same for you.


While all of this is going on, be certain to tweet about funny thing that happen to you, random thoughts as a writer, snippets from your day – fun things to read. If you go overboard with the marketing and retweets and #FF’s,, your tweet list  will look like one sea of red links, and you won’t get as many followers. Who wants  to get in touch with someone who talks like an infomercial all the time?


The more time you spend on Twitter, the more followers you will get. Don’t let it take over  your life, though. You have  books and blogs to write after all.


Which brings us back to that blog link you put into your profile. Remember how you told new followers that you would check out their links? And how you did? And how you liked some of them enough to follow their blogs so you could read them each week?


Well, some of your new followers will be doing that  to you as well. Through the use of Twitter, you will increase your blog readership. This is how social media will begin bleed over  across formats, in a good way.


Not only that, but as you look at your new  followers’  blogs and read their tweets, you’ll find new  opportunities. There are writers out there looking for guest bloggers and people to interview and books to feature. They might as well feature your book.


BTW - as a reminder, you only have 140 characters to tweet in. You’ll need to shorten some of those looooong  links.  You can do that at bit.ly, or at a host of other shortening sites. I like Bit.ly because it stores  your shortened links and copies them to your clipboard when you need them again.


As a final tip, now on #WW (Writer  Wednesday) I feature a few select friends, instead of long lists of @writername and @whoosis.  Here’s an example:


#WW @danielleraver - She’s funny, talented, and a tech whiz. Her book Brother, Betrayed is at http://amzn.to/jZxiSk

I actually tweeted that, by the way.


A tweet like that  gets a lot of attention - well, more than strings of @writernames, and the people I mention in those tweets get a real kick out of it. 


In my opinion, being classy, having a thick skin, and respecting the other authors out there will get you a lot further  in the Tweetiverse than any automatic Followback software. But I think that’s true of most of the aspects of being a writer.


Look for the next aspect of social media at Philosophies of a Young Heart by Danielle Raver, author of Brother, Betrayed, appearing next week.