A writer’s guide to Twitter
Twitter is easy to get started in, easy to learn, and easy to make mistakes. Fortunately, you’ll get better as you go along. This isn’t an exhaustive tutorial, just a “get started” tutorial!
First, sign up. Spend a little time thinking of a username, or “Handle”. @NicholasReicher was taken, by someone who hadn’t been active on Twitter in some time – but the bottom line is, it was taken. So, I used my first and middle initial. @NSReicher.
That’s it. Sign up, add your email address, your phone number (it requires this, but after the first tweet you can turn off the “send to phone” feature).
Upload a photo next. Can’t stress this enough. Don’t want to show your face? Fine. Put up a picture of your cat. Leaving it blank tells people you’re a spammer, and nobody will listen or follow you.
Change your header next. I spent some money making a series of graphics for my website and all social media. It was a very low amount of money, and I consider it a great investment. I probably should have used a professional company, but the inexpensive service I used was surprisingly professional. When you see those “online logo creator” places, some of them do really nice quality work!
That’s it! Now write a tweet. Here’s a great one: “Hey! I’m on Twitter! #writerslife”
The pound sign and words following is the infamous hash tag. I’ve clipped quite a few articles with Evernote on hash tags for authors, so I’ve learned a few. The most common ones are #writingtips, #amwriting, #amediting and for anything that’s part of the writer’s lifestyle or events associated with being an author, use #writerslife.
An important part of Twitter is to spend a few minutes every day looking at tweets from important people to you – it can be a self help guru like @MichaelHyatt, an author like @readstephenjames, or whatever. Try to retweet a couple of tweets a day. I try, but so few say anything that falls into my current platform niche.
How often to tweet a day? At least five, no more than 14. I once followed someone who tweeted about twenty six times a day. I unfollowed him the next day because everything in my feed was from him! My personal opinion is that I don’t tweet enough. I have seven tweets a day, plus my blog tweets every time my post goes online. Twice more a day would be better.
Once you are a published writer, selling thousands of novels, you can cut back to once or twice a day.
Just like with your writing blog, I STRONGLY caution you to leave politics and controversial social issues OUT of your writer’s platform. Your next potential agent and publisher may be the opposite political party. And your audience may possibly all be the opposite political party. Let’s just say I decided my platform to be about my writing (it is), and I make jokes and comments that are anti-dog, pro cat.
Let’s just say that all of my readers are pro dog.
Oops.
How many novels will I sell? I can have VERY strong feelings about cats being the better pet, or alligators or whatever, but if all of my potential readers are dog owners, I will have forever offended every dog owner out there, and I will sell ZERO novels.
Not very good for any plan to quit my job and write best sellers!
Leave politics and strong social issues out of your writer’s platform.
Make sure you set up the publicize feature of your blog – all you need is your Twitter handle, like @NSReicher. If you choose the plugin “Better Click to Tweet”, don’t add the @ sign. Just NSReicher. The pluging automatically adds the @ sign in its coding. If you’re at a loss for what to tweet, you’re welcome to prowl my blog and click to tweet some of my content!
I write ALL of my tweets in Scrivener. If you want to keep a copy in your Evernote, set up the Evernote to Twitter integration, and add @myen in your tweet somewhere.
Finally, I’d also add a couple of tools, like Tweetdeck (which will monitor your Twitter and anyone you’ve followed), and SocialOomph as a front end. Buffer is better in my opinion, but you are allowed ten scheduled messages a day in Buffer on the free plan. The best idea is to pay for Buffer, but alas, that has to wait until I’m selling a lot more novels! Use SocialOomph’s free plan to schedule your tweets. I’d recommend Buffer’s free plan to do LinkedIn also.
But we’ll get to that soon.
