How to Feed Your Tweets

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What, when and where to tweet

Are you sometimes scrambling what to tweet?  An important point with Twitter is to choose your passion, the topic you want to talk about and also to have your own brand, something people know you for.  

You certainly can send the occasional tweet about something completely different, but for the most part stick to your important topics.

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Content to Tweet About:

• Re-tweet news in your field on the Internet (Internet & news papers/magazines)
• Articles from your website, or your own blog posts & guest posts
• Set up Google alerts (http://google.com/alerts) for news content

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How Often Send Out Tweets?
Unless you have ten-thousands of followers, the chances that many people will see all your tweets and click on links are very small.  The number of followers and the tweeting frequency should match.  As no one is 24/7 on Twitter, you might have to send your posts two or three times a day, maybe in the morning, around noon time and early evening.  As more followers you have and the more you want to build a brand, or announce events, the more you should tweet.
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Automate  and Save Time
First of all:  Create a file (Notepad or Word document) and create a long list of tweets, using your own blog, guest blog, news etc. from which you copy/paste tweets, using headlines and URL’s.  Second:  create a folder where you place all your images you might use on Twitter or Google+, some you used on your blog, but also new ones. See our blog about free images you can get on the Internet.  Automate your tweets so that you don’t have to sit in front of the computer all day long. There are several tools you can use: We are scheduling on Hootsuite and also on Futuretweets, other providers are Twitterfeed, and Twaitter (now Gemln). They are slightly different and they serve different purposes.
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Twitterfeed 
Twitterfeed.com feeds your blog to Twitter, Facebook etc.  A YouTube video shows you step by step how to start Twitter feeds, however there are approx. twenty more videos to watch on YouTube.
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Twaitter / Gremln
Twaitter.com – now Gremln is a free product that allows you to schedule your own tweets (up to 20 an hour) on a single or recurring basis. The process is very easy.  You will also find Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn integration, detailed analytics, customizable dashboards, stunning reports, multi-user management, and a whole lot more.

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Link Your Blog to Twitterfeed or Twaitter (Gremln)
Every time your blog – or website for that matter – has something new it will be sent to Twitter. The other two options, Twaitter and TwitterAdder are where you should put all your best blog posts. When you’ve built up thirty or fifty blog posts, you will have a handful of favorites that you would like to recommend others to read.  Post the links in Twaitter or Twitterfeed and schedule them.
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Important:

• Re-tweets other content – a lot!
• Decide what your brand is on social media sites
• Set up automated tweets based on your sources
• Post often on Google+ and connect it with Twitter (automatically transfers to Twitter)
• Write a blog and feed the posts automatically to Twitter, FB, LinkedIn etc.

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Monitor Your Traffic
With the increased flow of tweets you will get more replies from people. Be prepared to answer them!  You’re also going to have to carefully monitor the traffic that’s coming to your blog and from which Social Media site or organic search it is coming.. This is a great way to understand which of your tweets are working and which are not.

Using the analytics on your blog, you can see how many hits you are getting:  When do you get peak traffic?
Re-arrange your tweets a little bit and don’t forget to use hashtags with relevant keywords. Try new things. A few video blogs from YouTube, or a series of special blog posts that you can link to.  Over time, you can get others to discover you and getting them to re-tweet your posts.

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Never Too Early
Building your brand on Twitter – or any other social media site – doesn’t work overnight. It takes time and as earlier you start as better for you as an author. You will want to have a big following long BEFORE your book is finished (maybe even before you start writing) in order to have a great start when launching your work.

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How To Use Twitter For Book Marketing

 

Twitter is a place for conversation where each statement has to take place in 140 characters or less. However, there is a wide variety of options to start or refine your twitter feed.

Offer Quality Experience
Stay consistent and give people an idea of what to expect. If you start a professional channel, don’t share personal information. The key is to be proving your value and your worth.

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.

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 short and to the point, so that people have room to comment on your thoughts.

Use #Hashtags
The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags. Instead of making up your own hashtags, see if a more popular version for your topic has already been created at: http://tagdef.com. To see just how popular a given hashtag is, visit http://hashtags.org.

Timing is Important
Sometimes you don’t have the time to constantly sending tweets into the flow to keep up with the stream. In these cases, time your tweets so that they appear in front of the most readers. How do you do this? Make use of http://tweetoclock.com to find the best time to tweet specific people. Or you can take the advice of marketing experts and tweet at a general time, such as 1pm Eastern Time in North America, that has the largest impact for hitting your target market. However, there is an even much better suggestion: tweeting multiple times a day to give yourself a presence within that flow.

Be Useful for Others
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.
About Book Marketing via Twitter
One author wrote: Yes, you can tweet about your book when it’s appropriate. And you can do such marketing strategies that I did:  I offered a signed copy for each of the top five donors to a fundraising campaign for deployed U.S. soldiers. This offer got extensive publicity for the book without my “broadcasting” promo news about it.

More on Twitter:

Book Marketing on Twitter
http://www.sellingbooks.com

Guide to Twitter
http://www.theatlantic.com

Twitter Help Center
http://support.twitter.com/