These Twitter tweaks for writers and authors show how to: unfollow people who are not following you back; automatically Tweet posts from your blog, Linked In, and Facebook accounts; suck up to important people; and use your Twitter profile to drive traffic to your blog.
The tips are organized into three categories: Followers, Tweeting, and Miscellaneous. If you missed last week's Twitter article, here is is: Twitter for Writers: Strategies for 2014
I) Followers
1) Follow influential people and writers in your industry
- Use Twitters search tool and search on key terms and hashtags
- Use a search tool like Tweepi to find followers with similar interests.
- Use Twitter's List feature to create lists of only your best, most important followers. Retweet their Tweets. More on this.
2) Follow their followers
- You should be able to follow 10 to 50 new people a day, depending on how many people you have following you.
- Twitter will warn you if you attempt to follow too many people: Heed the warning and stop following people for 24 hours. Twitters frowns on people who have few followers and follow lots of people. Try to maintain a similar number of followers to people you are following
- I have 4,000 followers and have been able to have follow about 4,200 or 200 more people than people who follow me.
- More on this:Twitter's policy tips on how to avoid having your account suspended.
3) How to unfollow people who don't follow you back.
Free tools such as Manageflitter used to make this process very easy. Recent changes to Twitter, which discourage bulk following and unfollowing, have made these tools trickier to use. But it can still be done. Here's how to do it with Managerflitter:
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| Step 1: After signing in to Manageflitter, click "Not Following Back." Go to the last page of the results -- people who have been ignoring you for the longest period of time. (arrow on upper right) |
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| Step 2: Click the little box next to each person's name. Managerflitter let's you dump up to 100 people per day. |
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| Step 3: Click "process now" |
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| Step 4: Reclick the boxes on the left next to each person's name. Then check your Twitter profile to verify that you've dumped some people you were following. |
II) Tweeting
5) Brown nose
When you retweet important people of folks with whom you want to curry some favor, include their twitter handle -- including the @ sign -- in your Tweet.
6) Tweet more often
- People "with 15,000 plus
tweets have between 100,000 to 1 million followers," according to a post by social media expert Jeff Bullas.
7) Save time by prescheduling posts
Try a scheduling such as Hootsuite. Be sure to install Hootsuite's Hootlet, which lets you capture and Tweet Web pages while you're browsing the Internet. To find Hootlet: In Hootsuite, click the wrench icon on the left column to open the Tools menu. Then click on Hootlet.
Try a scheduling such as Hootsuite. Be sure to install Hootsuite's Hootlet, which lets you capture and Tweet Web pages while you're browsing the Internet. To find Hootlet: In Hootsuite, click the wrench icon on the left column to open the Tools menu. Then click on Hootlet.
8) More automation: Have your posts to Facebook, Linked In, Google+, and your blog automatically added to your Twitter feed.
- Google/Twiter integration: Sign up for a free account at Manageflitter. Select Engagement from the top menu, then Google+ integration and follow the instructions.
- Linked In: Add your Twitter handle to your Linked In profile. Go to your Linked In home page, enter a status update in the "Share an Update" box. In the "Share with" box below your update, select "Public + Twitter."
III) Miscellaneous Tips
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| In addition to the link at the end of my profile (randyrossmedia.com), I added a second link to the body of my profile (theloneliestplanet.com). For the body link, use the full url with http:// etc. |
10) Are your Twitter efforts paying off?
One of my goals with Twitter is to drive traffic to this blog. This easy to measure with a Web analytics tool. Statcounter is one of the simplest, cleanest Web anaytics tools
Another goal is to beef up my Klout score, a measurement some employers and literary agents consider important. In my experience, adding followers and tweeting regularly boosts my Klout score more than my activities with other social media. More on Klout scores.
More Social Media Tips
- Building a Writing Platform: My Results for 2013
- Quick, Dirty Blogging Tips for Writers and Authors
Art attribution: Top image "Twitter" by Esther Vargas Attribution-ShareAlike License
