Tuesday, March 25, 2014

11 More Great Twitter Tips for Writers


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 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.

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:

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)


Step 2: Click the little box next to each person's name. Managerflitter let's you dump up to 100 people per day.



Step 3: Click "process now"


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 


4) Use images and photos -- correctly -- in your Tweets. Here's how.

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.

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



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



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Thursday, March 20, 2014

Twitter for Writers: Strategies for 2014



Twitter can be a good tool for finding new readers and connecting with influential people you don't already know. It can also be a colossal waste of time -- even more so because the site recently changed some policies that can affect writers promoting their work. This article discusses recent changes -- both bad and good -- and includes work-arounds and tips. As with any type of promotion, be sure to measure your results. For example, is the time you're spending on Twitter driving people to your Web site or Amazon page? You're checking your Web traffic stats regularly, right?

 

Recent Changes


1) Twitter is now encouraging you to include photos and images with your posts. This could be a good thing if you're handy with graphics software. If not, your posts may get lost in a tsunami of dopey pet photos other people post.

Note: Encouraging users to post photos is a social media trend: Facebook recently implemented policies encouraging its users to do this. Read about Facebook's tweaks and how to make the most of them.

2) It is now easier to add a stream of Twitter posts to your blog or Web page.

3) Twitter clamped down on tools, such as Manageflitter, that automate the time-consuming processes of following and unfollowing people. (Next week's blog will include a work-around for this.)


1) Adding Photos and Images

 

Research suggests that people are more likely to click on a post featuring a "picture" than one feature just a link or straight text. In October, Twitter added a feature called Image Preview that displays pictures in followers Twitter feeds. Previously, followers had to click on a link to see the image, now it just appears -- if it is properly formatted.

Two images I uploaded to Twitter and how they appear in a Twitter feed.Notice that the text post in between the two images gets lost.

- What counts as a picture? Anything that is saved as a graphics file such as a .jpg. So you could take a quote from your book, add a border to it, save it as a .jpg and that would qualify as a picture. A good article discussing pictures and images.

- How to format pictures so Twitter will accept them for Image Preview
* Images can be no larger than 3 MBs. (the images in my example are 50KB and look fine)
*As with Facebook, pick images that are rectangular. Some experts recommend formatting images that are twice as wide as they are high. That isn't always necessary: In my example above, the top image, a screen capture of my Twitter profile, is 440 pixels wide by 220 pixels high. The second image of me with the sheet measures 600 by 400)

- How to upload pictures: When you click on the "Compose a New Tweet" box, a camera icon appears. Click the camera and you'll be prompted to upload a file from your computer.

- Twitter also lets you add youtube videos to your Tweets. However, these will not show up as large images the way photos do. (To include a video, enter the youtube link into the "Compose a new Tweet" box. Include a snappy headline or other text to entice followers to click.)

- Images, as well as videos, inserted into Tweets are collected in the "Photos and Videos" box on your profile page. To remove items from the box, click on the arrow, click on the item, and then click delete, which removes the Tweet from your Twitter feed. Note: If you create a Tweet using a tool, such as Hootsuite, the image or video will not be added to the "Photos and Videos" box

The Photo and Videos box displays six recent items. To remove an arrow indicated by my red arrow.

- Simple tools for creating pictures and images: Items created in Powerpoint can be saved as .jpg files. Irfanview is easy to use and let's you crop, annotate, and resize images.

- For more detail than you want on adding images to Twitter


2) Embed Your Tweets onto a Web Page or Blog

My Twitter stream (recent posts) added to my Web site.


This capability isn't new, though Twitter has beefed up the features. To add your Twitter to a Web page.

On your Twitter page:
- click on Settings (the little gear in the upper right corner of the pages)
- click Widgets
- click create New
- Once you've finished, Twitter will generate somme code that you need to copy and paste onto you Blog or Web page.
- More on embedding your Twitter Timelines (your Tweets).


More Social Media and Twitter Tips for Writers


- Confusing Twitter Terms in Plain English
Note: the two posts above are older: some of the Twitter interface has changed, but the strategies still work. 


Art attribution: Twitter image by Dennis70 (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons




 

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