Wednesday Wing brings you GREAT Tips and Notes

Today we bring you #TwitterTips part 4 – Tweeting with Style by @TerryTyler4

Twitter Tips

Part 4: Tweeting With Style

With millions of tweets floating about cyberspace every minute, how do you make yours worth a look, a smile, a retweet, a link click or a follow?

This is a huge subject with lots of sub-topics, but I’m keeping it brief here (I’m trying, Rosie!) with a few basic dos and don’ts to improve your Twittering.

DO:

Make it interesting ~ for instance, if you’re tweeting a book review, try giving more information than just ‘Review of Another Book by A.N. Author’ and the link. Say something like ‘I loved this book!’, or ‘Recommended for a light beach read’. Indicate the genre, or add a couple of hashtags: #NewYork #Murder, or whatever. With thousands and thousands of book reviews being tweeted every day, titles by unknown authors can so easily be passed by, unnoticed.
Add a photo ~ you can add up to 4. Illustrations catch the eye! You need to leave 24 characters to add a photo to a tweet—do so by clicking the camera at the bottom left hand corner. For a tweet about a book, you could use the book’s cover, then another picture to show the subject matter; for instance, a devastated landscape for a post apocalyptic thriller.
Go to town promoting your own book! See those 280 characters as a mini advert, and use them well – include a picture or two, maybe a review quote (not ‘I couldn’t put it down’, please!), or a brief, catchy phrase. I discovered a favourite author (Joel Hames) by a great tweeted tagline: ‘Not everyone will make it to drinks on Friday’. Or you can hashtag relevant words ~ I discovered another new favourite (Ann Swinfen) by her hashtags #Fenland #history #17thCentury. Just tweeting ‘Check out my book’ will guarantee that no one will.
….but don’t waste those 280 characters on pointless hashtags: ‘#FiveStarReviews’ or ‘#FiveStarRead’ mean very little; there’s scarcely a book on Amazon that doesn’t have five star reviews, even if it’s just a couple from the author’s pals. On the other hand, if it’s got 40 of them, that IS something to tweet about!
Be bold but don’t get cheesy/make daft claims. No, the latest part of your vampire series is NOT ‘the sequel everyone’s been waiting for’, or ‘the book everyone’s talking about’, unless you’re a genuine best selling author (and by ‘best selling’ I don’t mean ‘reached #1 in an obscure genre chart two years ago!’).
Make sure your grammar and spelling are correct—and, if you’re a writer, your punctuation, too. Yes, even in a tweet.
If something funny or particularly profound/relevant pops into your head, tweet it! It’s good to tweet without links, sometimes…
Think up a great headline for your blog posts. Anything that starts off with ‘How to’ or ’10 tips for’ or asks a question is guaranteed to make people click the link.
Give credit ~ If you’re tweeting something via someone else (ie, reposting a particularly good blog post), don’t forget to add their @username.
Comment! If you like a picture that you see tweeted, if something makes you laugh, say so ~ everyone likes to know they’ve provoked a reaction.

And a few DON’TS…

Don’t only tweet promotional stuff about your own work. Twitter is a social networking site, not a free advertising forum.
Don’t get into public arguments. Yeah, I know, we’ve all done it sometimes….
Don’t start a tweet with a @username, unless it’s a reply or you only want that person and a few others to see it. If it’s a general tweet (something like ‘@rosieamber1 reviews Another Book by A. N. Author’), rephrase it so that the username isn’t at the beginning, or simply put a full stop before the username—that way, it will be included in the general feed for all to see.
Don’t confuse Twitter with Facebook. They’re very different sites; most of your Twitter followers don’t know you and it’s likely they won’t have seen the stuff you were talking about yesterday, or even half an hour before. Tweeting something like ‘Done it right this time! Here’s the second part’ will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of the people who see it.
Don’t be too cryptic. It’s good to tweet something that will make fellow tweeps think ‘I wonder what that’s about?’, but there’s a fine line between ‘intriguing’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Before you click the tweet button, make sure you haven’t crossed it.