Writers! Bloggers! Are you using Twitter? If you are, answer these two questions:
1) Are you using it to publisize your work, or want to?
2) Do you have fingers?
If you answered yes to both these questions, then this post is essential for you.
Twitter the ultimate advertising tool.
First of all, twitter should not be your main source of advertisement. I just want to make that clear, that there better and more effective ways to advertise than twitter, but they all cost money. Twitter is free. Free. It’s one of my favorite words. Free. And I’ll say it a lot, don’t even try to stop me.
Now let’s cover why.
One tweet, can easily be seen by a number of people. Now hundreds of tweets would be seen by at least hundreds of people. Usually one tweet for my blog will bring in 2-10 people. With Triberr, I can easily multiply the amount of views. Here at AKAQ (A Knife And A Quill) we get an average of 160 unique views a day, with just tweets and facebook post. We don’t advertise in any other ways, at least not yet. Even before I had used it to get people to read my stories on devianArt, which would easily get me 10-20 views per tweet. Which, due to responses, has help grow my fanbase. And those fans respond to me and send me messages on twitter all the time. So here’s a secret to my small success: twitter is worthless without followers.
How to make Twitter work for you.
I see it all the time, a new author with 80 followers. I just invited two authors into my triberr tribe only to realize they barely have any followers. Which is okay, because it didn’t cost me anything to get them in my tribe and most importantly, they are probably going to read this post.
An author with less than a couple of thousand followers isn’t helpful. I hear this all the time though, “Yeah but my followers are loyal, strong followers.” First of all, I doubt it. Second of all, if you have only 80 followers and expect to be one of the big dogs, it doesn’t look impressive. Even though, and here’s a big assumption, you post a lot, having few followers makes it look like no one wants to follow you. It may take a while before you get out beyond 200 without some help. So that’s why you are reading this post. To get more followers, so that you can advertise tweets to more people. We need more followers, and not just any followers, but followers who read what we tweet. So of those 80 how many are fiends and family? So this is how you get followers, it’s a known practice that many people use including corporate businesses, because it works.
Follow people like your mouse button has a mind of it’s own.
Tweepi is an easy software that will help you on your way. You can search for a user, and follow all the people that follow them. For example, pull me up and follow everyone who follows me. Follow at least 200 people and see how many follow you back. It’s amazing. Then in a week unfollow those that didn’t, rinse repeat.
“But L. that’s not fair, you didn’t get those followers fairly.” Fairly? Since when was advertising fair for anyone. We have authors who throw money at their book to sale copies, we have authors who make fake reviews, and we also have authors who buy thousands of copies of their book just to get on the best seller’s list. What’s wrong with following a couple people you don’t know? I see it as being polite.
I went to college, not for a literary degree – I wish I did – and I ended up at Texas A&M for a year before going broke from it. There they have like hundreds of traditions, many of them are fun and interesting. But the most important tradition, which I think was great rule to follow, was saying “Howdy” to everyone you saw. It was fun and friendly and many times a conversation would spark up. And you made a friend.
Twitter is the same way. The millions of people on twitter don’t know you exist, but something as small as a “follow” can bring a new friend into your mix of tools. Meet @M_rinny a devoted fan of mine I met on Twitter. She re-tweets my tweets to her followers, she replies to many tweets, she talks about my stories; she’s one person that has by far been a huge impact on me getting noticed. Here’s another @mendystar1. She’s a deviantArt watcher that actually helped me get on twitter. She’s the reason I’m even on it to begin with and have gotten this far in my writing career.
Follow as many people as you can. It’s like saying “Howdy” to people who can help you.
-L. Vera
P.S.: My twitter account is @LVeraWrites and I have over 8000 followers and growing. Also, this was also just a introduction to Twitter, expect more articles in the future on how to use twitter “The Right Way”.
11 Comments
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A Knife And A Quill- old 
Reblogged this on Evangeline Warren and commented:
A wonderful post for those of you who have twitter or a currently promoting a book.
Thanks. I’ll post a more intermediate twitter post later in the month. Stay tuned. 🙂
Hi and thanks so much for this post. It’s helpful to us babes in networking who walk blindly thru the internet figuring things out the hard way. Giving back to the writing community is such a noble and caring thing to do. Many thanks!!! And if I could bend your ear for a sec. I have a question, I’ve been embarassed to ask. We have been right before 2,000 twitter friends for a while. And I hate it, because if new friends happen to follow us, I can’t follow back without dropping other friends. How can we get around this step. Twitter really says nothing to us except, “You’ve reached your limit”. Any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Thankyou,
Inion N. Mathair
Don’t be afraid to ask anything. It does get kinda hard around 2000. At that point you ate following lots of people and waiting for others to follow you to extend the 2000 barrier. At this point follow some of the strangers. Or put them into a list, then unfollow them. The people in the list will stay there and later as you get higher you can look back at your list and refollow them. Then go back to grinding more followers. Keeping in mind you can’t go follow that much more then the amount that follows you. I hope that was helpful.
Very much so! Thank you, we’re taking your advice right now, working on it.
Inion N. Mathair
Awesome. 🙂
I’m not entirely convinced, but I do see your logic. You got me thinking…
That’s good. What’s your twitter ID? I’m I following you already? There’s a good chance I have. 🙂
If you follow 200 people at a time, don’t you get blocked as a spammer? That’s what happened to a journo friend of mine.
Great post.
Nice point. The number to be blocked is high. I follow sometimes over 400 a day and hasn’t been blocked. I’m not 100 percent sure but I think it has something to do with following and unfollowing a lot in a couple of days. I like to unfollow on mondays. And ten the rest of the week follow between 200-400 followers, if I remember. I don’t do it rebelliously. Just here and there with a goal in mind usually some where in the next 1000.
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