Wednesday Wing – #TwitterTips Part 4 “Tweeting With Style” by @TerryTyler4 #wwwblogs

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Rosie Amber

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.

Now go forth into the Twittersphere and tweet with style!

TwitterTips Part 1 – Getting more followers http://wp.me/p2Eu3u-90C

TwitterTips Part 2 – Expanding Your Reach http://wp.me/p2Eu3u-936

TwitterTips Part 3 -Retweeting and Post Sharing http://wp.me/p2Eu3u-93V

Wednesday Wing – #TwitterTips Part 2 Expanding Your Reach by @TerryTyler4 #wwwblogs

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Rosie Amber

Here on Wednesday Wing we bring you all sorts of post and tips to do with blogging, marketing, and writing.

Today we’re looking at Expanding you Twitter Reach

Thanks To @TerryTyler4 for this post.

Twitter Tips

Part 2: Expanding your ‘reach’

Last week we looked at how to get more followers, http://wp.me/p2Eu3u-90C and today I’d like to offer some ideas about how to expand the ‘reach’ of your tweets, and thus your blog, if you have one, too (my personal blog has had 336,778 views since I started it 4 years ago, and my book review blog 82,392 views since I started it 16 months ago; I daresay some get tons more than that but they’re quite respectable numbers, so I hope these tips help!). Please note that this post is orientated towards writers/bloggers, but the same principles apply whatever your area of the Twittersphere.

Say at the moment you’ve got about 3500 followers, and have built up a great community of writers, bloggers, book reviewers and some faithful readers. You’re all sharing and reading each others’ blog posts, taking up book recommendations, etc; it’s good. What may be happening, though, is that you all have a similar active following (bearing in mind that all followers are not active), so you all tend to see much the same posts going round and round, staying more or less in the same tiny corner of Twitter. If you’re happy with that, fine; many people are content to stay within the community they’ve made on social networking sites. But if you want to break out of that corner and step out into the wider world, how do you do it?

Try some of these ideas

If you’re a blogger or writer, you probably know about the blog sharing hashtag days, such as #MondayBlogs, #TuesdayBookBlog, #wwwblogs, #SundayBlogShare, #ArchiveDay, #FolkloreThursday, etc. You’ll already know that if you just click on the hashtag, you see posts from people you know, and a few from other familiar names; Twitter’s algorithms work to make you see the posts from the people with whom you have interaction. However, if you click on the hashtag and then on ‘Latest’, you will see all the other posts on the hashtag, from accounts with whom you’ve not yet had any connection. If you retweet/follow some of them, there is a good chance that they will retweet and follow you back, thus putting your posts in front of all their followers, too.
Use high traffic hashtags on your tweets:#NewRelease #BookReview, @UKBlog_RT (a profile that RTs for you), #bookbloggers, #bookworm, #writers, #writerslife, #selfpub, #amreading, #amwriting, #FridayReads. You can find more relevant hashtags for your particular area of Twitter simply by having a browse around. Don’t use more than a couple per tweet, though; tweets that are too hashtag-heavy get overlooked.
There’s a whole world out there! As well as using those high traffic hashtags, click on them, too, and retweet others who use them—yes, people you’ve never seen before! When you’re doing your following back (I click on my followers list every couple of days and follow back any new ones that interest me), make a note of any people whose bios particularly appeal to you. Go to their page, RT something by them, or just say hello.
Go onto the general feed now and again, and RT any random stuff that you think looks interesting—or comment. Everyone likes confirmation that their tweets have been read/enjoyed/laughed at for the right reasons (!), and there’s nothing like the personal touch on Twitter; it shows that not everyone just thumps out tweets via Hootsuite.
If you’re an author, don’t only tweet about books and writing. Share posts relevant to the rest of your world, too; you might want to make a general comment about a TV show you’re watching, or something in the news that interests you. If it’s a topic of current interest, hashtag any likely looking words. If the main purpose of your Twitter account is to promote your books, it’s worth remembering that if you only follow, talk to and retweet other writers, your posts will only be seen by writers – lovely for networking, but only a few will be the target market for your books.I hope that’s given you some ideas; next week I’ll be talking about RETWEETING ~ because the power of Twitter lies not just in the tweet, but in the retweet!