Twitter (http://www.twitter.com)can be an effective marketing tool
for any business and particularly for writers. A “tweet” is a self contained
thought of 140-characters or less, once posted it is delivered to each of your
followers. Your timeline shows tweets from everyone you follow.
These little snippets of information can
be direct sales pitches, shared information about interesting topics, re-tweets
from other users and open messages addressed to other users. Many blog posts
and online articles have “share buttons” where you can send a tweet directly to
your account and share/promote the post. There is also a Direct Message (DM)
feature where your message is shared only with the person you addressed.
The main thing to remember is to vary
the type of messages you send – if you send only sales pitches or book promos,
people will lose interest in following you. One recommended formula is to send
no more than three out of every ten tweets for book promo.
Hashtags (#) are a way of building a focused
community topic around a current news item, an activity or a meme. #FF is
Follow Friday and #WW is Wednesday Writers; this is a good way for one person
to recommend others to be followed. A writer participating in NanoWrimo might
use the hashtag #nanowrimo, or someone commenting about the upcoming weekend
might use #TGIF. Using Hashtags and the Discover feature is also a good way to
find new people to follow.
It is important to build a profile
for yourself. When you sign into your account, click on “settings” and then on “profile”;
fill in information about yourself that will help to attract the community you
wish to interact with. An author should list that they are an author, writer or
other term to indicate the field – this will make it easier for others to find
you and/or know whether they want to follow back. Some people will not follow
back anyone with a “blank” profile. You also have the option of uploading a
profile picture or graphic if you choose.
When someone follows you it is
helpful if you follow them back, it helps to build an interactive community. If
you follow many more than follow you, Twitter may limit your ability to follow
people – there are some third party applications that will help you wean out
folks who have not followed you back or you can do it (painstakenly) by
yourself. Also don’t bother protecting your tweets if you are using your
account for business or promotion, it is self-defeating and will deter people
from following you.
Create lists when you want to be able
to view a specific group of tweeters (i.e.: a writing group) and make sure that
their tweets haven’t gotten lost in your timeline.
Finally at all times be professional –
make sure your tweets are representative of the impression you want to make.
Writing exercise:
Write ten independent tweets describing yourself, your work, your likes,
your dislikes, hobbies, an interesting news item, a book promo, etc. It’s up to
you whether you want to publicly tweet these or keep practicing on a piece of
paper.
Writing prompt:
Without reading the newspaper or magazine article, choose headlines that
intrigue you and copy a few onto a piece of paper – What caught your attention
about each headline? After reading the article, was the headline accurate?
