I first got on Twitter back in October.
It was easier to find content to re-tweet. Lately though, I’m having a lot of problems finding suitable content to re-tweet.
- Politics – Okay, let’s assume I’m a die-hard whatever. And you’re the opposite party. You’re so firmly committed to it, you can’t see that your commitment to its rhetoric is spilling over into your tweets on writing tips. Or even, let’s say I agree with you 100% – but I’m aware that there are many who do not! I can’t re-tweet that. Let’s examine our writings and make sure we’re not using #writingtips to foster political agendas that have nothing to do with writing a book or movie.
- Profanity. I’m aware that the demographics show that using one word gets a lot of hits. But I’m also keenly aware of the lesson I learned years ago – if you’re resorting to profanity, it probably means you have nothing to say. Again, a portion of your market will not click on tweets that have profanity in them. Why rule out a potential market, or even a percentage of them? It may only be 30%, but last time I looked, that’s around one out of three. Bad odds. And Twitter is the un-follow capitol of the universe. A single tweet they don’t consider interesting enough is grounds to lose followers. I haven’t unfollowed because of profanity YET. But after one entrepeneur refused to stop using the S word over and over again in his email list, I unsubscribed. Then another. Then another. If they had a service to sell to me, that’s out the window now. Profanity leads to lost income.
- Bad writing advice – no kidding, this has become an epidemic in the last few months! Literally an epidemic! Good gravyboat!!! A little common sense goes a LONG way. Some people should not be writers, because they simply haven’t stopped and EXAMINED their writing to see if they can improve their craft. It’s never too late. Learn to be a good writer FIRST, THEN teach others how to write!
- Copying – several times I’ve seen some people re-tweet without re-tweeting – highlight someone else’s tweet, ctrl+C, then paste into Buffer or Hootsuite without giving credit for the quote. That’s theft. No kidding, it’s bad when you steal someone’s tweet, and someone at the very same moment is re-tweeting the original. I’ve seen that. I’ve also seen people lift my own tweets word for word, and pass it off as their own! And to make matters worse, someone re-tweeted my original tweet at the exact moment, so they ended up online in the #writingtips at the same time! You’re advertising to the world you have very little integrity, and if a producer or editor was considering you, that can make up their mind for them.
- Copycat- not the same thing, but I remember a few months back having a discussion in my writers group about fight scenes. A lot of them had no idea how to write them, so I wrote a multi-part article on fight scenes for writers. Within three weeks, a lot of other writers had written similar articles on it, and put the links on twitter. There’s a difference – I’m a trained fighter in many martial disciplines, from Kung Fu to Karate to MMA and BJJ, and can fight with a number of weapons. Many simply wrote their own articles without any of that training. Probably not a good idea. Come up with your own ideas! Like “The writers guide to…” (fill in the blank).
- Passive voice and Mystified tweets. Someone I really respect as a writer lately has been tweeting things I’ve read, and wondered, “um… I have no idea what you just said.” If you’re going to speak cryptically, you’re not going to get re-tweeted! Passive voice – the bugaboo of every writer – is another problem. Be clear, concise, accurate, and make the person reading it say, “Yes! That’s awesome!”
- Tweeting obscure quotes by obscurer writers in a meme. I have no idea who some of these people are I’ve seen quoted lately! No kidding! I’m not going to re-tweet you if I have NO IDEA who this person is! Go ahead, tweet meme’s fron Nicholas Reicher and see who (besides me) re-tweets it!!!
Conclusion
If you want to be re-tweeted, the best advice I can give is write something worth re-tweeting. It doesn’t get any simpler. Avoiding offending one another is great as well, and clean language means people take you seriously.
