Twitter Best Practices

Twitter is a place for conversation where each statement takes place in 140 characters or less. Despite such a simple mode for communication there is a remarkably complex number of options when it comes time to start or refine your twitter feed. In that spirit, here a compiled list of best practices, either obtained through osmosis, through research or 1st hand experience, that will help you to make the most of your tweeting!

1. Be brief - Even for Twitter

Save room for people to retweet with their opinion. This especially includes your name, for each time someone retweets you, they have to quote you. Be willing to speak with brevity so that people have room to comment on your concise thoughts.

2. Present a Quality Experience

Stay Consistent with your Channel and give people an idea of what to expect. They will respect you for it. If you start a professional channel, don’t share personal information. It will only alienate your audience. Or, make it clear in your profile that you will be tweeting personal and professional information.

The key is to be proving your value and your worth. You can always ask yourself, why am I posting this? You don't even have to promote your book much in your twitter feed. If you get peoples attention and interest, they can follow a link to your website where you make your book-pitch there.

3. Use Hashtags creatively

Hashtags have a twofold purpose, they act as metadata, allowing you to tag your tweet with a specific keyword.They also act as a link and gateway to other tweats with same hashtag, allowing you to create little information portals within one tweat that can be used to underline a point or educate your viewers. For more information on Hashtags, visit:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2011/02/metadata-for-the-tweeps-twit...

Instead of making up your own hashtags, see if a more popular version for your topic has already been created at: http://tagdef.com/ This consistency allows you to take advantage of a stronger "flow" of information and interest centered around any given keyword. To see just how popular a given hashtag is visit http://hashtags.org.

4. Timing is key

Sometimes, the flow of information is to fast or you don't have the time to constantly be injecting tweets into the flow to keep up with the stream. In these cases, time your tweets so that the appear in front of the most eyeballs.

How do you do this? Make use of http://tweetoclock.com to find the best time to tweet specific people. Or, take the advice of marketing experts and tweet at a general time that has the largest impact for hitting your target market (My Example: 12p.m. MST will have a good chance of hitting locals on lunch, east coasters on break or getting bored with work, and Pacific coasters just getting settling into checking their feeds.)

Popular topics, even if not trending, need to be persued with either a twittifying zeal, or a crafty strategy. For example, with half of America waking up, or starting their day, at 8:06a.m. MST, their has been a 86 new #ebook tweets in the last half hour. If you just tweeted once your tweet is destined to get buried.Most most twitter best praciteces have suggested tweeting multiple times a day to give yourself a presence within that flow. But if everyone is out marketing their own ebook, your only hope of selling your is to be selling an ebook that helps sell ebooks.

That may be a bit of a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, but my point is: if everyone is tweeting, and using it has a marketing tool, the channels that are going to rise to the top are going to be those that present the most quality experience (See Best Practice #2).

5. Craft a Channel

Figure out your marketing goals, and then craft the purpose of your channel on top of those goals. If you are starting a twitter feed to “sell more books” and then just plan to share promotion after promotion, no one will follow you because all you doing is speaking at them, there is no vested interest to become your follower.

6. Strive for Authenticity

Being authentic with your brand and/or social media channel allows you to focus your energy where it belongs most: on creating a quality product. Don't bother wasting energy hiding behind a fictional mask, either ...

7. Keep your Tweets real when trending opportunities arise

Don’t bother trying to latch on to a trend if it’s not relevant to your tweet. It will only hurt your credibility with your true-target demographic, and it will also come across as disingenuous and shallow. Example: http://socialmediavoice.com/2011/03/how-not-to-use-hashtags-rts-in-...

8. Post away with a trend if it IS relevant!

In twitter, when something is trending that means the stream of information is flowing very quickly. If there is a trending topic and you have something to say about it - allot to say about it - while it is trending is a great time to say it, because that's when the most eyeballs when be on the topic. The more you tweet the more time you have your message in front of eyeballs and brains.

9. Make sure you research your information.

Just because it's twitter doesn't mean we can forgo traditional media practices. It's important to maintain credibility by only associating yourself with legitimate facts. A recent example of trusting the twitterverse when they should have vetted: http://splitsider.com/2011/02/the-day-twitter-gave-birth-to-bart-si...

In the above Bart Simpson case, even retweeting when the source was trusted wouldn't have helped because even trusted sources were retweeting with out vetting.

10. Know your brand

Don’t alienate by going on a series of rants, or by posting tasteless jokes, unless your brand demands it. Make sure you maintain that distinction with your tweets.

For more information and Twitter best practices I recommend checking out the following websites:

Book Marketing on Twitter - Misconceptions and the Truth

http://www.sellingbooks.com/book-marketing-on-twitter-misconception...

The Bare Bones Guide to Twitter

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-bare-bone...

Twitter Help Center Best Practices and Following Rules

http://support.twitter.com/entries/68916-following-rules-and-best-p...

Best Practices for Branded Twitter Accounts

http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/twitter-marketing/best-practices-b...

7 Ways to be a Good Twitter Citizen during a Crisis

http://www.eventuresincyberland.com/2011/03/7-ways-to-be-a-good-twi...

Also!

Joint our Twitter List in progress at:

http://www.spannet.org/group/onlinemarketing/forum/topics/twitter-l...

Follow: SPAN Executive Director, Brad Poulson @IndyPubBuzz

Tags: Best, Practices, Twitter, independent, publishing, self

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by River Landing Press on March 15, 2011 at 8:13am

Thanks, Bradley. This seems like good advice, and not intuitively obvious. I'm going to print this and incorporate it into my still-forming strategy.

Permalink Reply by Bradley Flora on March 15, 2011 at 9:01am

Your Welcome!

And keep that mind and strategy flexible. In the last hour, over 181 tweets with the #ebook hashtag have been posted.

If all self-publishers are using twitter, and all of them are posting self-promotional tweets about books and ebooks. The new paradigm is going to quickly drown in this self-promotional wave.

That's why I tried to emphasize creation of a quality channel, and quality product. The cream always rises to the top, as they say at metaphor conferences..

..As more and more people find out about the power of twitter, the more promotional power, and communicative power, it has. The key is going to be knowing what to say and how to say it, to reach the people you want it to.

I really resonate with the idea of twitter being a communicative tool, not a promotional tool, and then letting your value shine though and your pitch staying on your website. That feels legit to me right now..

I'm real interested to see if this proves to be the case. I plan to release my first narrative ebook this summer and will be using this strategy of...i guess I could call it selectively indifferent promotion, myself.

So please let us know if it resonates more with you, as you begin to implement your marketing plan, and please share with us your own experiences here in this thread, as there are always more then one way to do things right!

Permalink Reply by Bradley Flora on March 15, 2011 at 9:41am

There has been another 115 #ebook tweets in the last twenty minutes. Not all of them are publishers promoting there books, some of them are just people having a conversation.

As a viewer, I see allot of interesting topics within all that activity, but I also see tweets in which my eye just glances over and then moves on. Here's a good example of one that I just doesn't grab my attention

WarezDeck WareDeck

Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition: Covering 10.10 and 11.04 (6th Edition): Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition: Covering 1... http://bit.ly/fa8qBn"

This one is from a software company, that, as far as I can tell, is publishing an ebook about Linux workstation implementation (and more!). Of course, none of that was clear in the tweat, I had to click on the link to find that out, and even then it was still greek to me.

The point, if you're going to take the time to tweet during peak hours. Like right now (9:40A.m. MST), then do everything you can to encapsulate interest and value into your 140 characters, because there will probably be someone who has never heard of you or heard of your book, and you'll have just a few seconds to make a positive impression upon them.

Permalink Reply by River Landing Press on March 15, 2011 at 10:17am

Brad, what I'm learning is that many of these Tweets "self-generate." That is, you may be posting a Blog article, and zap, when you hit Publish, it Tweets. then your headline might not be self-explanatory in 140 characters. It's changing my view of how to write a headline.

Alice

Permalink Reply by Brad Poulson on March 16, 2011 at 6:29am

Brad and Alice,

This is a great discussion – thank you!

I just wanted to add this resource. It’s a link to the SPANpro education library that features five short articles with advice on Blogging from Brian Clark.

Drive Traffic to Your Blog, by Brian Clark

You’ll see, Alice, that he confirms your insight on the importance of the headline.

Permalink Reply by Bradley Flora on March 24, 2011 at 12:11pm

Alice,

That is a very good point, and when I read it I thought of the correlation between marketing and art. Or even just the art of marketing.

In art, the masters have ultimate control over their medium, and are in control of the production of their final product.

Today, thanks to the Internet, we can't always perfectly control our marketing message, because everyone has a voice. But we can control our tools and the process of self-awareness that allows us to refine our message and it's placement within multiple mediums.

Self-awareness, of a brand or otherwise, is a good trait for everyone to have. In online marketing, in which you can easily self-adjust your message, keeping track of your final product and making changes to it can require an extra level of effort.

Sometimes, this extra step can be challenging, especially if it has been a long day, but the effort is worth it if it gives you a chance to refine and add clarity to your marketing pitch.

That's what I think was lacking from that tweet that I used as an example. As you mentioned they probably started from another platform and sent it to twitter with no conscious knowledge of the final result.

bradley flora
SPANnet.org

~written using Android 2.1~

Permalink Reply by Brad Poulson on March 16, 2011 at 6:58am

Here is one example of using of a Tweet using Twitter attribution and Hashtags:

@TheMOMU @scottfloraSPAN Are talking Twitter Best Practices: http://ning.it/gwyxck You can too! #Twitter #SocialMediaMarketing #in

@TheMOMU is Alice Richmond of River Landing Press
@scottfloraSPAN is Bradley Flora who is managing, and transitioning Scott’s Twitter feed.

The Hashtag, #in, automatically posts a Tweet to my LinkedIn profile. By linking Twitter to SPANnet on My Page, I can post a SPANnet update and it appears on Twitter and on My LinkedIn profile.

Critique?

Permalink Reply by Bradley Flora on March 22, 2011 at 12:44pm

Boss,

The only critique that I can suggest right now would be that you should have included a link to your own twitter feed when you quoted it. I know we mentioned it above, but repetition of a subtle marketing vector never hurts.

For example, if I was going to write about you and your twitter feed (which expands on what you could include in the above post - but a solid example never hurts, either), I would make sure to include the vector (the link) and also a short description that encompasses both your professional relevance, your goals, and what people can expect from you on twitter. This is basically the same type of information that you can include in your profile description on twitter, answering "why should I follow this?"

Brad Poulson, Executive Director of SPAN, can be found on twitter as @indypubbuzz. He tweets original content from SPANnet about independent publishing best practices, openly discusses and promotes various issues and concerns related to the publishing industry, and also retweets SPAN member's content.

b.flora

SPANnet.org

Permalink Reply by Brad Poulson on March 22, 2011 at 4:36pm

Thank you, Brad!

Permalink Reply by Bradley Flora on April 6, 2011 at 5:21pm

Here is a few examples of how not to Tweet:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/04/worst-twitter-pr-fails_n_8...

Most notable is the use of trending hashtags in "inappropriate" ways. As you probably already know, use of a trending hashtag for off-topic commercialization is considered spam on twitter.