Posts Tagged Twitter

Benefit of the Pinned Tweet

Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical, Promotion on October 8, 2015

Twitter gives you the functionality to ‘pin’ a tweet to the top of your profile. Any visitor to your Twitter profile will see the ‘pinned’ tweet first, followed by all your other tweets (including those that you tweeted after the pinned tweet).

There are two benefits to a pinned tweet:

Gaining new followers. Any one looking at your profile can immediately see one of your own ‘best’ tweets rather than a host of re-tweets that you’ve kindly done for other people or spurious thoughts that you’ve tweeted at random. This helps people decide what you’re about and whether or not to follow you.
Getting more and better re-tweets. When you RT someone, they may re-pay the favour by RTing one of your tweets. But it can be pot luck what they chose to RT, it may be something irrelevant. However, if you have a pinned tweet this is likely to be chosen because it’s easy to spot right at the top of your profile. So, with a pinned tweet, the RTs you receive become better quality.

It’s easy to ‘pin’ a tweet. Go to the tweet that you want to pin. Click on the three dots. Select ‘Pin to your profile page’. Note – you can only have one pinned tweet at a time, not several.

I picked this tip up last week at an event on book marketing organised by Lizzie Lamb and the Leicester RNA. There were several interesting speakers and lots of advice thrown in from the floor too. And, as always, it was good to spend a day with other writers.

Anyone else have any good Twitter advice?

Twitter for Writers

Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical, Events, Promotion on December 2, 2014

At the weekend I attended the annual Writers’ Toolkit in Birmingham, organised by Writing West Midlands. One of the sessions was Making the Internet Work for You with Sathnam Sanghera and Kate Feld.

Many interesting questions were asked about making social media work as a promotion tool for writers. The outcome of the session was that Twitter is an essential part of a writer’s toolkit.

It shouldn’t be used to post family & friends stuff – Facebook is the place for that – and it shouldn’t be used to continually shout ‘buy my books!’ I get the impression it’s purpose is to engage in sensible conversation and to follow those who may be tweeting useful information such as agents, publishers etc.

I think I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve yet to dip my toe into Twitter and perhaps I’ve dragged my feet so much that by the time I string together my first tweet, everyone else will have disappeared off to the next big social media thing.

So, I’m asking all you Tweeters to give me your advice:

What do you tweet about and how often? Is it OK to repeat yourself on Facebook and Twitter (as long as it’s not a cat video or other ‘silly’) or do you attract the same audience on both platforms?
How much time do you spend tweeting and/or reading other people’s tweets?
How do you get followers?
Is it expected that you will follow everyone who follows you? (I believe there is a ‘mute’ button if you want to switch people off).
Do you think Twitter is beneficial and if so, in what way?
Anything else I need to know?

Please feel free to put your Twitter handle in your comment too.

On a different subject and to show that writers come in a multitude of guises, at the Toolkit I came across someone who used to write labels for museum exhibits and someone else who used to write Ceefax pages for the BBC.

Kate Feld, Sathnam Sanghera, Twitter, Twitter for Writers, Writers' Toolkit, Writing West Midlands

30 Comments

Sell Your Books! Part 2

Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Promotion, Resources, Self-publishing on October 24, 2012

In my last post I introduced you to Debbie Young – book promotion guru. And this post concludes her sage advice:

Many writers worry about the time-consuming nature of maintaining a presence on social media. What is the best platform (blog, Twitter, Facebook etc.) to concentrate on?

All of these do different things, so it’s hard to say that one is better than the other.

With a blog, you are totally in control. Running a blog on your website will increase its standing before search engines, so I’d recommend it to all authors – and writing blog posts is a great exercise for honing your writing skills, too.

Twitter allows you to reach people you’d never meet in real life, who share your interests and passions – so select the right people to follow and they’ll be naturally predisposed to liking your book.

Facebook is good at keeping your progress before those you know, and for getting friends to “share” your posts with their friends – a kind of pyramid selling! You can also create a Facebook page specifically for your book, rather than putting it on your personal Facebook page.

GoodReads is a great way of networking with people who are, by definition, all avid readers (and a lot of writers too).

But social media can be hugely time-consuming! It’s a question of discipline, self-knowledge and honesty. Be firm about what you want to get out of these things, and only use them to help you reach those goals.

How can a self-published author gain national publicity for their book – local papers and radio stations may be willing to promote a writer from their region but how does a writer move outside his own geographical area?

Social media is the biggest opportunity, because you can make contacts with people from all over the world. But there are other, more traditional opportunities too. I’d recommend not touting your book to get national recognition, but coming up with interesting comment and valuable expertise to gain you coverage as a person – as a commentator or programme contributor – from which more awareness of your book will follow. I’ve often listened to an interesting discussion on the radio between anonymous voices and heard at the end the names of the people and the books they wrote. I’ve gone off and bought the book on the strength of it.

On Radio 4 alone there are plenty of magazine shows that need topical, expert material for their programmes – Woman’s Hour, Money Box, the Today Programme, PM. Your book and the knowledge or experience that enabled you to write it might give you viable ideas for an article, or an engaging comment to follow up a programme.

Approach your target programme’s production office with a well-thought out idea, backed up by your credentials as the author of a book on the subject, and you may get lucky. (Other national outlets can also be approached in this spirit – the nature of your book will dictate what should be your priority, e.g. a special interest national magazine in your field.)

Whichever media you approach, always have the media coverage you’ve had to date, your sales figures, and your reviews at your fingertips. When you put it all together, you might surprise yourself with what an impressive portfolio your book has.

Keep track of current public debate relevant to your genre. Get involved in national discussion via old-fashioned letters to the editor, comments on blogs or radio phone-ins. Always quote your credentials as the author of a relevant book, this will make it clear that you are an expert with something interesting to say about the subject.

Be opportunist. Manufacture your own luck. If you want to win the lottery, as the old joke goes, you have to buy a ticket…

Thank you for the advice, Debbie and there’s lots more great information in Debbie’s book and on her blog.