How to get on well with Twitter - by Roz Morris

I had to be dragged to Twitter by the scruff of my tail. I had a blog - wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t Twitter just a means of wasting time? 

I soon saw it was a fantastic move. A couple of days in, my blog visits trebled. If your blog is like your writing salon, until you’re on a network like Twitter you’re talking at a closed door.
And blogging aside, Twitter is a terrific tool in its own right. Half your job as a writer is making contacts; on Twitter you can do that without ever going to a meeting, a group or a launch. 

So those are the professional platforming reasons to tweet. But Twitter is not a pitching party or a careers fair. It’s not your blog. No one has to follow you, read your tweets or pass on your news. Although you can bumble up uninvited, it’s as easy to buzz people off as it is to make friends. 

Here are some things I learned along the way.

1 The 80:20 rule - What do you tweet? Obviously you want to draw attention to your posts or books, but tweet others’ posts, books etc far more than you tweet your own. No one minds if you go promo-mad at times of excitement, such as launches or if you get a new review, but some people hammer away with ‘my book is marvellous’ day in, day out, excuse or no. When you do mention your book, introduce it gracefully - eg ‘read the first 15 pages of The Erring Cupboard here’ - which doesn’t leave the reader feeling hectored. 

2 Make tweets interesting. Don’t put ‘Interesting post http:whateverblog.com’. What’s it about? What made YOU find it interesting? Twitter’s about contact and personality. Write a headline of your own, or at least put the post’s headline: ‘Why Twitter isn’t trivial’. And not every tweet has to be a link. Be a person. Ask questions. Some folks start each day with a hello to whoever is out there. Trivia is fine if it’s engaging; Twitter is sometimes about putting a hand out and seeing who waves back. Be spontaneous. Be surprising. Be silly. 

Let him do his own tweeting

3 Don’t regurgitate inspirational quotes. They’re usually crap and have been seen a thousand times. Make up your own - we’re writers after all. Gandhi can tweet his thoughts for himself. 

4 Not too much, not too little. Everything comes out on the tweet stream instantly. When I started I thought I was doing the right thing by putting up a burst of tweets, but that makes you look as though you’ll deluge people. Conversely, if the last time you posted was two weeks ago a potential follower may assume you gave up. 

5 Find a scheduling service to spread your tweets out. You want to keep a steady presence, but you don’t want to be a slave to it. I use Hootsuite (which is, like Twitter, free as air). Other options are Tweetdeck and SocialOomph. Then I hop back to see if anyone has responded to them, or if I can natter to other people who are interesting. 

6 Credit others. When I retweet a post, I include the name of the original writer (searching for their Twitter handle if necessary) AND the handle of the person who passed it to me. There are two reasons. As a journalist I feel it’s unprofessional not to credit sources. Reason 2: Twitter tells you if someone has mentioned you. If you mention another tweep’s handle, they see - and thus they might become interested in you... another tweep’s wings just flitted through your heavens. (More on Twitter handles here from my friend Porter Anderson at the blog of agent Rachelle Gardner.)

7 Don’t start a tweet with @name unless you only want it to go to the people who follow them and follow you. That’s usually a very small set. But put a magic full stop in front of the @ and you will tweet it to all the people who follow them PLUS THE people who follow you. Big difference. 

8 Although you want your content to go viral, do not include the words ‘please RT’ or ‘worth the RT’ unless your tweet is for urgent humanitarian reasons. I’ll work out for myself if I want to RT. 

9 Don’t tweet as the character from your book. Would you follow that if I did it? Some publishers are telling writers to do this - but this advice has usually come from consultants who haven’t a clue. One Big 6 publisher I know had Twitter training with such an expert, who neglected to tell him the stuff in point 7 about @s and full stops. 

10 As this is a conversation, I leave point 10 to you. In the comments or on Twitter :)

Thanks for the pics James G Milles topgold  Daquella Manera  

Roz Morris is a bestselling ghostwriter and book doctor. She blogs at Nail Your Novel  and has a double life on Twitter; for writing advice follow her as @dirtywhitecandy, for more normal chit-chat try her on @ByRozMorris. Her books are Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books And How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence, available in print and on Kindle  She also has a novel, My Memories of a Future Life available on Kindle (US and UK) and also in print. You can also listen to or download a free audio of the first 4 chapters right here.