Getting it “Right” on Twitter

Twitter

Never too early to start:  Building your brand on Twitter – or any other social media site – doesn’t work overnight.  It takes time and as earlier you start as better for you as an author.  You will want to have a large following long BEFORE your book is finished (maybe even before you start writing) in order to have a great start when launching your work.  
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Twitter is wildly popular and it’s a great way for you to interact with your community and reader audience.  Introduce yourself on Twitter, similar how you do on all social media sites, in a way that makes people interested in who you are.
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Perfecting Your Twitter Name.
The best part of your brand is your name, but your author photo, typography, and colours are also part of your brand.  Brand recognition means that those who remember your name are more likely to pick up and promote your work.  That’s also true for your social media platforms, such as Twitter for example.  Carefully choose your twitter name, background image and your logo.
If your bio, along with your name and @name, is searchable on Twitter, which means people can type it into Twitter’s search engine and find you, without even having to type the account name.  With your @name, try to get the actual name of your small publishing business.  Keep it short to give others more space to retweet your content or send a direct message (DM).
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Photo – Icon – Avatar, aka Logo.
Your readers like to see the person behind the book.  Invest a couple of dollars or more for a brilliant studio photo which you can use for years on all of your Social Media sites, website, blog, Amazon author page or submit to your publisher to use in your books.  Publishing businesses use their logo and stick with it everywhere, to have brand consistency.
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AVOID:
Party images, pics taken with your phone or computer, landscapes, snapshots from your last vacation, images of your children, wedding photos, art work, dogs or cats, cartoon characters, half-nudes unless you write erotic and any dark photos, that don’t reveal your face, or any photos, taken from the side or from behind and show only your hair and no face. Never have a second person on your social media photo.  You might be in love with your partner, but it is less than professional to show this off on Twitter.

  • The portrait needs to be big enough
  • Your face should be recognizable
  • Make sure it’s a photo of “you”, that really shows the best of you

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Use 160 Characters for Your Bio Wisely.
You have only 160 characters for your bio, so make sure your description is clear and concise.  Your bio should read like an elevator pitch.  The first third of your profile should contain keywords related to your books.  Include specific keywords that define your books.   Think about what keywords a potential customer or prospect would associate with your books or your publishing company.  Which search terms would they use to find your book or your website?
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Start Your Tweets With an Attention Grabber.  
You have only 140 characters for a reason, soon maybe 160 – a tweet is supposed to be short and to the point!  Start your tweets with something that will get attention.  Be subtle about this, though.  Don’t use capital letters to show your enthusiasm.  Start a tweet with “New” or “Learn” to at least grab the reader’s attention to lead into what you are talking about.
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How to Increase the Amount of Followers:
Use the search function to find like-minded Tweeps, e.g. type in “reading”, “booklover”, “bookworm”, “avid reader”, and most important: “book blogger”, “book reviewer”, etc.
You will want more readers than writers as Twitter followers, right?   Type into the search function words with hash tags #amreading or #Goodreads.  Check out suggestions: “Who to follow” and there you best click on “view all” on your left bar of your Twitter page.  A as more people read your messages, as more Twitter followers you will be able to invite as Goodreads friends.

If you want to become popular on Twitter and have your tweets go viral, check out these small, but significant challenges you might not be aware of.  Avoid them.  So whom do I follow – or better NOT…

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Celebrities:
Well, often they only think they are one. They do not follow back, even if they have 10’000 followers, they just follow 66 of their friends.  In writing/publishing/photo/marketing circles I found them mainly among literary agents, YA writers and business advisers.  Fine with me.  As they are not interacting with me, nor re-tweeting anything I am posting, why should I follow them?

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Me, Me, Me’s:
They consider Twitter as a free advertising board. When I go to their profile and scroll down I can’t see any re-tweets whatsoever.  Some even never re-tweet.  Only their continuing posts, varying from three to six subjects, and this for pages and pages… What I found so far: 80% of these are male and/or are introvert writers or leadership business advisers.
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Over-Social:
Too much of a good thing.  They are lovely people, don’t get me wrong.  They are re-tweeting, re-tweeting and re-tweeting some more.  And if you want to thank them and reciprocate you cannot find anything they are tweeting.  Maybe on page 41…  But I don’t have time to go through all these hundreds of re-tweets to find anything they originally posted to return their favor.

Veeerrryyy long names:
Like “@Writer-Angelina-Christine-Parastopolis”.  If one takes up half of the space just for the name, there is barely anything left for conversation.  Just cut it at least in half, thanks.
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OK, enough said.  These are just four of many challenges that make it difficult to interact with others on Twitter – or prevents tweeps to click on Follow you and for you to build social networks and build a platform.  To become popular and successful on Twitter:

Follow others, tweet something valuable for others and don’t use Twitter as a cheap way to advertise!

  • Create a nice mixture of your own, really interesting tweets and do some re-tweeting.
  • Choose a very short Twitter name.
  • Make it as easy and convenient as possible for your fellow tweeps to engage and interact with you.

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Do You Use Twitter To Its Full Potential?
One of the most common questions is “Why Twitter?”  Well, Twitter was built to share news and updates from you or your company.  Twitter users expect to receive them from you.  It is built to send people to other websites – or your author sales page.  When done right, you can promote your content over and over again without seeming spammy – something most social networks don’t allow you to do.

The key to a successful Twitter use is to build the right audience. A targeted, engaged Twitter following allows you to succeed.  You might have a million followers, and they would be worthless – if it is not the right audience.
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Here are Some Strategies:

  • Create a list of popular bloggers (use Google search) in your field
  • Use the search function on Twitter and type in relevant keywords
  • Follow or create Twitter lists

The purpose of these steps is to help you build a solid following that retweets your posts and will follow you on all your other social media platforms and on your website and book sales pages.
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#Hashtags Increases Your Visibility.
Tweets need to be optimized for Twitter’s search engine. Similar to GooglePlus, the inclusion of the right keywords in tweets will allow you be more visible in search queries.  Using the right hashtags, links, and images will set you up to be more optimized for Twitter searches.   Twitter is allowing people to search through every tweet, ever published.  Make sure you have at least 2-3 hashtags on each tweet you post.
Add #hashtags to your tweets and also create tweets based on hashtags that are popular on Twitter at the time (you can see these as “trends” on the left-hand side of your Twitter home page).
Include a #hashtag or two in your posts to get better search results as well.  To optimize your hashtag usage, search for the most used hashtags in your industry.  Try going to search.twitter.com and enter the hashtag you would like to include in your tweet to see if it’s being widely used.  You can also go to hashtags.org to see what’s currently trending.  Ask for retweets (but not too often).  Studies showed that more than half of all Tweeps will retweet if you simply ask them to!  More tips what and how to tweet:

  • Tweet the latest news
  • Pick the right time of day
  • Leave room for a retweet
  • Use top re-tweet-able phrases
  • Write a tempting headline
  • Don’t make the tweet about you
  • Pick the right time and day of the week, Monday & Friday
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Don’t Buy Followers. Never! Ever!
These artificial followers (not real people, just virtual twitter accounts) will never re-tweet you or buy your book.

If you have anything like these numbers – you are in trouble:
268 TWEETS 2004 FOLLOWING 345 FOLLOWERS
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Un-follow people who haven’t followed you back after a couple of weeks.  This is especially important to avoid “follow limits”. The first limit at Twitter you might hit, is when you have followed 2,000 people.  You won’t be able to follow any more until you have 2,000 followers.  So remove your non-followers, using Manageflitter.com or Unfollow.com.
However, don’t use their really annoying feature that tweets on your timeline: “Got 5 followers and 9 unfollowers”.   This is not only an absolutely useless tweet, but makes you at the same time a free advertiser for them!
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Get Enough Twitter Followers.
Don’t be a Tweep with a pathetic following of less than 100 people.  And don’t sign up with only one or two Social Media sites.
Take advantage of the great possibilities of sharing among all these sites.  It is almost the same “work” if you are on one site, compared to having a presence on six or eight sites through the help of plug-ins and sharing buttons, as outlined in former blog posts.

Visitors on your Goodreads page click on the Google+ or the Facebook icon and send a message about you and your book to thousands of their followers.  Google+ then sends the message automatically to Twitter.
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To have lots of Twitter followers is also beneficial for your Goodreads presence, as you can transfer Twitter followers with only one click over to Goodreads!
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Easy Scheduling.
Tweet consistently and tweet at least several times a day.  Sign up with the free version of Hootsuite.  It really saves a lot of time, helps you planning your tweets over the day (or days) and frees you time to really interact with your followers.
It ensures your consistent presence on Twitter when you’re unable to tweet in person.  Once you are familiar how it works and you have lots of followers, you might change to the professional version.
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Timing of Your Tweets:
It seems Monday and Friday are the best days of the week, to get re-tweets.  Tweet between 8am and 9am and 12pm and 2pm to get a maximum of re-tweets for your Twitter content.  If you have a website / blog: Did you already install the “Retweet” button?
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Retweet Buttons.
People are naturally inclined to share content they find valuable.  It shows to their followers that they are someone worth following because of the useful information they share, making them a valuable contributor to the social networks.  Encouraging your readers to share your book’s content in social media also extends the reach of it to people outside of your direct network.

Special retweet buttons allows readers to easily post a tweet into his or her Twitter account.  And it’s not just any tweet, but one that is pre-fabricated by you and links back to your e-book.  Retweet buttons allow any reader to easily post a tweet into his or her Twitter account.
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Retweet Buttons: Step by Step Explained.
Create a small graphic (a blue bird on the graphic gives a visual signal to Twitter users) you can place it in your manuscript. Place the retweet image in more than one location of your future book.

So where do you want to send readers?  Certainly to your books’ sales page!  Use a link shortener, such as bit.ly, as the original Amazon link is too long.  Create a short recommendation text to accompany the link.  But avoid hashtags in this text or replace them with %23, so instead of #reading, use %23reading.
Acrobat Pro will allow you to create hot-links inside your e-book file.  Use the “Link Tool” in Acrobat Pro (under the advanced editing menu), locate the retweet buttons you added into your file and create a clickable link for each retweet graphic.
To keep the link type invisible, highlight style to ‘None’ and select ‘Open a web page’ as the link action.  Then hit the ‘Next’ button.  You will be prompted to enter your special URL.
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Sell Your Free Book for the Price of a Tweet.
Instead of locking your book to Kindle Select and let it download at five days for free, let your readers “pay with a tweet”.
Another great way to introduce your upcoming book to readers: Write a prequel in form of a short free book, including links to your book sales page or your website.  But how to let as many readers as possible know about your free one – and at the same time about your new upcoming book?  Use the help of Social Media and let your free book or other written content go viral via Twitter by retweeting to your customers friends and followers.  Yet, not only can your readers pay with a tweet: FB, Google+ or LinkedIn Posts are possible too!  Nowadays it’s sometimes more valuable to have people talking about your book than the money you would earn for a sold copy.

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Comparing Social Media Platforms is Hard, as there is no “Better”.
Twitter lets you follow a hand-picked community of people. Unlike Facebook, where you likely have, out of your total friend base, a few hundred friends you wouldn’t have chosen, Twitter is meant for tailored follower groups, a world not made up of all of the people you have ever met but rather a community of people you admire or would like to know.  Tweeps get more immediate responses and it lives somewhere between the worlds of email, instant messaging and blogging.  Twitter has a loyal following, especially among the technically savvy; bloggers, online marketers, writers and anyone with something to promote seem to find Twitter extremely valuable – and it really is!
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Twitter is More Mobile-Friendly.
Tweeting from a mobile device will always be quicker and easier.  That’s because Twitter was born as a mobile network, like Instagram was.  Facebook was born as a website that adapted, as all websites must, eventually to the mobile space.  You have only got 140 characters; how long could that take, even if you add a photo?
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What to Post on Twitter?
Your first step is to organize your tweets: Start a file where you place all your posts to use in the following months or years.

  • Take a dozen of your most popular blog posts and break them down into quotes
  • Share other people’s content
  • Post video clips and images
  • Check out “Trends” (in your field) on Twitter and re-tweet
  • Post excerpts from book reviews
  • Quotes are always popular…
  • Thank your followers often and mention them

Scrambling what to tweet?  An important point with Twitter is to choose your passion, the topic you want to talk about and also to have your own brand, something people know you for. You certainly can send the occasional tweet about something completely different, but for the most part stick to your important topics.

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Content to Tweet About:

  • Re-tweet news in your field on the Internet (Internet & newspapers/magazines)
  • Articles from your website, or your own blog posts & guest posts
  • Set up Google alerts (http://google.com/alerts) for news content

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How Often Send Out Tweets?
Unless you have ten-thousands of followers, the chances that many people will see all your tweets and click on links are very small.  The number of followers and the tweeting frequency should match.  As no one is 24/7 on Twitter, you might have to send your posts two or three times a day, maybe in the morning, around noon time and early evening.  As more followers you have and the more you want to build a brand, or announce events, the more you should tweet.
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Automate and Save Time.
First of all: Create a file (Notepad or Word document) and create a long list of tweets, using your own blog, guest blog, news etc. from which you copy/paste tweets, using headlines and URL’s.  Second: create a folder where you place all your images you might use on Twitter or Google+, some you used on your blog, but also new ones.  Automate your tweets so that you don’t have to sit in front of the computer all day long.  There are several tools you can use: We are scheduling on Hootsuite and also on Futuretweets, other providers are Gremln.  They are slightly different and they serve different purposes.
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Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed http://twitterfeed.com/ feeds your blog to Twitter, Facebook etc. A YouTube video shows you step by step how to start Twitter feeds, however there are approx. twenty more videos to watch on YouTube.
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Gremln
Twaitter.com – now Gremln is a free product that allows you to schedule your own tweets (up to 20 an hour) on a single or recurring basis.  The process is very easy.  You will also find Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn integration, detailed analytics, customizable dashboards, stunning reports, multi-user management, and a whole lot more.
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Link Your Blog to Twitterfeed Gremln.
Every time your blog – or website for that matter – has something new it will be sent to Twitter.  When you’ve built up thirty or fifty blog posts, you will have a handful of favorites that you would like to recommend others to read. Post the links in Twaitter or Twitterfeed and schedule them.
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Important:

  • Re-tweets other people’s content – a lot!
  • Decide what your brand is on social media sites
  • Set up automated tweets based on your sources
  • Post often on Google+ and connect it with Twitter (automatically transfers to Twitter)
  • Write a blog and feed the posts automatically to Twitter, FB, LinkedIn etc.

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Monitor Your Traffic.
With the increased flow of tweets you will get more replies from people.  Be prepared to answer them!  You’re also going to have to carefully monitor the traffic that’s coming to your blog and from which Social Media site or organic search it is coming.  This is a great way to understand which of your tweets are working and which are not.

Using the analytics on your blog, you can see how many hits you are getting: When do you get peak traffic? Rearange your tweets a little bit and don’t forget to use hashtags with relevant keywords.  Try new things.   A few video blogs from YouTube, or a series of special blog posts that you can link to.  Over time, you can get others to discover you and getting them to re-tweet your posts.

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Last But Not Least: Twitter Lists.
What is a list?  Similar to the Google+ Communities, Twitter has it’s lists where you can follow or being followed by people with the same interests.  A list is a curated group of Twitter users – for example readers in your book’s genre.
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You can create your own, or subscribe to lists created by others. Following a select group of users can be very useful, and a great time-saving feature.  But tweets from your lists don’t show up in your primary feed.
Marketing Specialist Whitney Zelmer: “The process of generating ROI from Twitter lists takes time, so be patient. Keep engaging and offering interesting, timely information and you’ll eventually notice that others will start adding you to their lists.”
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Where to Find Your Twitter Lists?
Click on your Avatar icon on the right upper spot where it says: “Profile and Settings” and you will find the word “Lists”.  The message: “You aren’t following any lists yet” appears.  Now click on: “Create a new list”.  Give your list a name and a (very) short description.
To add someone to your list, go over to his or her Twitter profile.  Click on the Settings icon (right upper row, the small wheel icon, next to the follow button).  Scroll down to “add or remove from lists”.  You can create up to 20 lists and you have the option to make each one public or private.
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Social media star Michael Q Todd gives these tips regarding Twitter Lists: “You can only follow a certain number of people per day and in total.  When you make lists however this restriction is blown away.  You can make 20 lists and have 500 people on each of them but 500 may be way too many if all those people are highly active.

Your lists help to brand your account.  If I want to know what a new connection is primarily interested in I can quickly scan through the topics of the lists that they have created.  You can learn a huge amount about people from this.  So be careful how you brand your lists!  This includes the description as well as the title.”  He also advices:

  • Thank people when they add you to a list
  • Add your lists to Klout
  • Constantly modify your lists
  • Add yourself to your lists (Many people miss this.  Where it is powerful is when others start using your lists.  They are following lists that I am on and see my tweets because of this.)

Some Twitter users never check their “Home” Twitter feed, they always use their Twitter lists to narrow down interests.  Invest more time in your lists! 

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SocialMediaExaminer recommends:
“Twitter is a widely used resource to collect and share information, as well as interact and develop relationships with others in your field.  To fully utilize the benefits of Twitter for your business, you need to get organized.  As Twitter continues to branch out, information will get even more random and difficult to filter.  Well-kept lists act as a permanent filter for each of your interests.”
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Get More Twitter Tips:

http://www.socialquant.net/twitter-lists/

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/12-tips-to-engage-people-on-twitter/

http://kimgarst.com/how-to-use-twitter-lists-for-time-management-and-profit

http://www.highachievingwomen.biz/business-growth/what-i-have-learned-about-twitter-how-to-introduce-yourself-and-get-noticed/

https://www.savvybookwriters.com/9-habits-of-successful-writers-on-twitter/
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Is there anything you think of, people can do to become a star in the Twitter-Sphaere, other than to post really great content and be social with others?  Any good advices you have for them (or for me : )  Happy Tweeting!

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