Social media platforms are vital for professional promotion and
an invaluable tool for authors and small businesses – one such site is Twitter.
Despite all of the comedic satires, it is not a place to post every trivial
action of your day in 140-characters or less.
When you open your Twitter account it’s a good idea to use
your real name or close identity (like @ChelleCordero) – you want to build YOUR
brand, a.k.a. YOU. While it might seem like a cute idea at the time, a profile
name based on a single book title or character from that book is not going to
help your brand recognition when you publish your next book.
Your Twitter profile should offer info about who you are, a
writer, an author, a music lover, etc. and while it can include some personal
information (like to ski, wife, mom…) that should not be the focus. Use a
professional picture or logo, if you use a cartoon hopefully it is a caricature
or something that helps to identify you. Using a book cover is the same as
using a book title as your handle. Sound professional, experienced and
friendly. The profile is also a good place to post your website, FaceBook fan
page and other pertinent links.
Other “tweeps” will often rely on your profile to see if they
want to follow you and you should check theirs out as well. When you are looking
for someone to follow someone see if they have common interests, speak the same
language and are active accounts. Although it is considered good manners to
follow someone back after they have followed you, be selective. Twitter will
limit the amount of people you follow if it is much higher than your followers.
Your name will appear in the other person’s follower-list so take care who you
are affiliated with if their “tweets” are controversial, vulgar or a waste of
time.
A “tweet” consists of 140-character messages, you will
frequently need to use abbreviations or cut out unnecessary words – the Twitterverse
is NO place for the Grammar Police. Tweet about your book progress,
appearances, awards, special announcements and limit straight selling tweets to
30-percent to none of the total tweets you send out. If you read a good article
that you’d like to share with other writers, for instance, tweet about it.
Re-tweet (RT) tweets that you find worthy of passing along; an advantage to
re-tweeting is that many people will return the favor and your message will
reach people who may not be following you. Include relevant shortened links in
your tweets. A good average to tweet during the day is 10 to 20, but be sure to
space them out so that you don’t blow up someone’s twitter-deck and also so
that your messages (and profile name) reach people who are on at different
hours.
If you are familiar with Twitter you already know that hundreds
of tweets can come in while you are offline and there is a strong possibility
of missing messages you might otherwise want to see. I build a list of specific
people or interests so that I click on the list and only the tweets by those people
show up. As an author with a small publishing group, I want to see the tweets
from the other authors in my group for possible cross-promotion so I have one
list, VHP; clicking on my VHP list I see a manageable view of tweets and don’t
miss anything important. Lists can be public or private. Anyone can follow a
public list.
I understand there are several programs to assist you in
managing your Twitter account, some are free. Two services I use are Hootsuite
and Tweepdash. With Hootsuite I can pre-schedule tweets so I can make sure
special promotions are spaced throughout the day even if I am not able to sit
at my computer. Tweepdash will scan my list of Followed and Followers and tell
me who is or is not following me back and who I am not following back – it makes
cleaning up my follow list easy. I admit to following a few celebrities who I
do not expect to follow me back.
So get tweeting and follow me @ChelleCordero – if you have Writer,
Author or Reader in your profile I will follow you back.
Writing
Exercise: Write at least 10 stand-alone
messages of 140 characters or less about the book you are currently working on.
Each tweet should be a clear message without relying on any information in the
other tweets.
Writing
Prompt: Select 3 to 5 songs that would
go along with the story you are writing IF that story were made for the big
screen. Where would you use each song and what character would you associate
with each?
