Tweet THIS, Not That! 12 Things Not to do on Twitter

This Week Twitter rolled out its new "mute" function for mobile phones. Muting will soon be available on all devices including your PC. That means you'll be able to mute anybody who tweets too often or annoys you with spam. 

So it will be more important than ever to avoid annoying your Tweeps. 

Here's some straight talk on the subject from Molly Greene, social media guru, blog coach, mystery novelist, and author of the handbook Blog It! The Author's Guide to Building an Online Brand.

I've learned a ton from reading her blog, so I was jazzed that she agreed to come to visit and tell us how to behave ourselves on Twitter.

And in case you think these are just "suggestions," pay attention to what Molly says about the Twitter Terms of Service. If you mis-use Twitter, your account may be suspended and you'll lose all your followers and have to start again from scratch. 

I've seen some of those "How I Made Millions with Kindle" books that tell authors to do all of the things Molly warns against. Keep in mind those books were based on successes in 2007-09 when ebooks were new and Twitter wasn't overrun with indie authors and marketers. What worked then has been so overdone, it doesn't work any more. And could get you suspended. 

Remember the first commandment of social media etiquette: Thou Shalt Not Spam. Short version: if it annoys you when it's done to you, it's spam. Spam isn't defined by what you can get away with; it's defined by how it makes your target feel...Anne

Tweet THIS, Not That!

by Molly Greene

If you’ve spent much time on Twitter, you’re probably already aware that all kinds of people hang out there. Authors, spammers, celebrities, ranters, self-help advocates, you name it. All sorts of folk hawking their products and services jostle shoulders in our feeds. 

It reminds me of eavesdropping on a thousand conversations all at once. And it’s easy to pick out personalities from a few simple tweets, because true character shines through. Am I right? 

Think of that next time you compose a 140-character sound bite.

Unfortunately, members of the self-publishing industry are notorious for utilizing aggressive book sale tactics on the platform. Every day authors jump onto TweetDeck and Hootsuite and program in a million tweets to try and sell their books – and often, this very practice is offered up to clients by book marketing consultants and social media experts who claim to be “in the know.”

I’m here today to refute that claim. While it’s perfectly acceptable to tweet a certain number of self-promotional messages, it’s not okay to tweet that promo directly to others. Unfortunately, I get a least one @mention a day from someone who isn’t following me, yet insists I buy their book and RT the message. Here are a couple of recent examples:

·       @mollygreeneFrom Parochial School to the VC-infested jungles of Vietnam, http://amzn.link recounts my experiences in UNIFORMS SF! #RT

·       @mollygreene“Remember TEN-B. Throat, Eyes, Nose and Balls. 1 day your life might depend on it.” THE MACHAIR CROW at http://amzn.link

·       @mollygreeneSpecial #BookBub#99centsFeature -Post Pattern on sale today! http://amzn.link #amreading#kindle#RT

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that I don’t believe these authors understand that this behavior is irritating – and spam to boot. 

And the tweets are nearly worthless, since marketing your book solely to other authors is a no-win game. (Especially an author who's not even in your genre! Send me tweets about heavy-duty gore and violence, and it's an automatic unfollow...Anne.)

Twitter is not a direct-sale platform, and Twitter rulescall foul:

 “If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies or @mentions in an aggressive attempt to bring attention to a service or link.” ...Twitter Terms of Service

That means repeatedly tweeting or DM-ing a demand for others to visit your blog (instead of simply providing links to valuable content), like your Facebook page (rather than simply providing value in your posts), or buy your books is not only deeply annoying, it can get your Twitter account suspended.

Examples of tweets you should NEVER send:

1.  Thanks for the follow @suesmith! Visit my Facebook page (or blog) and like me (or subscribe) there, too: www.bloglink oh, and buy my book! 

2. Thanks for the follow! You can read all about me here: bloglink 

3. Looking for a great read @suesmith? Buy my book: http://amzn.link 

4. Free today! #Free #Kindle #eBook #Giveaway #YoullLoveIt #BestNovelEver #MustRead #RT 

5. nice blog post @suesmith, now here’s mine – read and retweet: www.bloglink 

6. Why did you block me @suesmith? 

7. @suesmith just unfollowed me 

8. Hi @suesmith! I just followed you – follow me back now 

9. [Insert] angry rant about any event, person (including literary agents!), situation, or disappointment 

10. [Insert] unsolicited, sarcastic, buttinsky comment about my profile, tweet, blog post or conversation with another tweep 

11. [Insert any all-encompassing message in all caps] HI EVERYONE! HOW ARE YOU? HAPPY MONDAY, TWITTERVERSE! 

12. [Insert any horribly mis-spelled message] I no your gong to luv my buk!

All these behaviors will just irritate folks or get you blocked. 

So why are these types of messages a drag to read on Twitter? Because spamming with strings of hashtags, tweeting about who has unfollowed you, begging for retweets, bragging about your social authority, demanding follows, insisting people pay attention to your books, Facebook page, or blog content … all this is about you.

What should you do instead?

It’s easy to tell people what they’re doing wrong, harder to advise about what is right. But if you look at Twitter like you look at life, you’ll see that the same rules apply. 

Twitter works best when you put others first. 

How? Be a giver, not a taker. Be a resource. 

1. Tweet valuable content that will be of interest to your targeted followers. 

2. Add to the conversation by reaching out and complimenting others on the content they share. 

3. Shine the light on others. Then your fans and followers may flatter you by sharing your links and content with their own followers.

4. Thank those generous followers by sharing the RT love.

If you don’t have anything nice to tweet, don’t tweet anything at all

You are going to come across people on Twitter you won’t particularly like or admire. They might even pick a fight with you, challenge your position on something, hurl insults or badger or stalk you. 

In short, you’ll meet a small percentage of folks who hide behind social media and spew offensive things. Take the high road. Do not engage them. Do not add fuel to their fire by responding or adding to the drama. 

DO NOT retweet their unkind remarks in hopes others will take notice and come to your aid.

JUST MOVE ON.

Apply the 80/20 rule for self-promotion

Nobody’s saying you can’t self-promote or share sale links to your books on Twitter. 

But if your feed is over-weighted with calls to purchase your goods, be forewarned that followers will grow weary of your spiel and unfollow you. 

The 80/20 rule applies: post 80% helpful content + RTs of your follower’s content + personal, “live” convos with others, and use the remaining 20% for self-promotion.

Readers, what do you love and hate about Twitter? How do you feel about auto DMs, crabby tweets, and aggressive book sale tactics? How do you balance interaction and self-promotion on social media?

Molly Greene is a blogger and author of Blog It! The author’s guide to building a successful online brand, and the Gen Delacourt Mystery series, which includes Mark of the Loon, Rapunzel, and Paint Me Gone. She blogs about her life and self-publishing topics at Molly-Greene.com and she spends time on Twitter  (@mollygreene) • Facebook and Google+  Stop by and say hello!

***

PS from Anne: This week I found another helpful tip for writers using Twitter. If you're aiming for a traditional publishing career and you're submitting to agents, the hashtag #MSWL can be a great short-cut to finding the right agents to query.

#MSWL stands for Manuscript Wish List. Agents tweet what they're looking for (and sometimes what they're tired of) so you can get a peek into the minds of those agents you're so carefully researching. (You are researching carefully before querying, right?) Here's an overview of the #MSWL community from DS Mosier on the Publishing Cohorts blog.

Other Twitter hashtags for queriers are #querytip and #askagent. But DO NOT send book promos for a manuscript or self-published book with those hashtags. Seriously, when I checked the hashtag right now, I saw a bunch of tweets that looked just like Molly's "Twitter Don'ts"! Mostly that stuff gets ignored, but some agent just might see your tweet and remember you. Not in a good way. 
...Anne

Coming up on the blog

June 8th: Nina Badzin: social media expert and freelance writer: regular contributor to Brain, Child, Kveller, and the HuffPo.

June 22: Nathan Bransford: Yes. That Nathan Bransford (squee!) Blog god, former agent, children's author, and author of How to Write a Novel.

July 20th: Janice Hardy: host of Fiction University and bestselling YA author. Repped by uber-agent Kristen Nelson.

August 10th Jami Gold: editor, writing teacher, award-winning paranormal romance author, and awesome blogger.

September 14th Barbara Silkstone: bestselling indie author and owner of the Second Act Cafe.

And of course NYT million-seller Ruth Harris will continue her information-packed posts on the last Sunday of each month. 

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

Molly Greene's great blog guide for authors is available on Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CA , Kobo, and Nook

Blog It! The Author's Guide to Building a Successful Online Brand by Molly Greene

"Molly's book taught me so much. When I read it, I was pretty much blogged out. I'd said everything I had to say about the art and craft of writing and publishing. But Molly re-energized me with her concrete solutions for bloggers in need of new topics. I had to stop reading to jot down ideas for posts, that's how fast this book works.

Blog It! is easy to follow and packed with pertinent information. Molly gives clear, concise instructions for beginning bloggers and those of us in need of a blog-lift. I'd recommend this book to any blogger, from seasoned pro to newbie to not quite there yet."...Cynthia Harrison

and also...

FREE ON AMAZON!!

Due to a weird glitch, Anne's funny mystery SHERWOOD LTD. is FREE right now on Amazon US. (I'm not sure if it's free in other countries, since they don't show the price) It climbed to the top 200 free books over the weekend: #3 in Humor and #21 in Romantic Comedy. So if you haven't read #3 in Camilla's misadventures (great to read as a stand-alone) and you want a fun summer read, grab it while it's free. My publisher is working on restoring the price, but he has no idea when it will go back up to $3.99

Camilla's hilarious misadventures with merry band of  outlaw indie publishers in the English Midlands, where she falls for a self-styled Robin Hood who may or may not be trying to kill her.

"Good Manners for Bad Times author Camilla Randall (Dr. Manners) could use a publisher, or, at least, the cash advance from a publisher. Currently broke and homeless, she would welcome opportunity knocking on her nonexistent door. Eventually it does. Sort of. From across the Atlantic, the upscale pornography press, Sherwood, Limited, is looking to become respectable. Free residency in their Lincolnshire factory is included. How can any well mannered person decline?" ...Kathleen Keena

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS

Amazon’s literary journal Day One is seeking submissions. According to Carmen Johnson, Day One’s editor, the litzine is looking for “fresh and compelling short fiction and poetry by emerging writers.” This includes stories that are less than 20,000 words by authors that have never been published, and poems by poets who have never published before. To submit works, writers/poets can email their work as a word document, along with a brief description and author bio to dayone-submissions @amazon.com.

Drue Heinz Literature Prize for a collection of short fiction and/or novellas. Prize of $15,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Author must have been previously published in print journals. Deadline June 30.

The Saturday Evening Post "Celebrate America" Short fiction contest. $10 ENTRY FEE. The winning story will be published in the Jan/Feb 2015 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, and the author will receive a $500 payment. Five runners-up will each receive a $100 cash payment and will also have their stories published online. Stories must be between 1,500 and 5,000 words in. All stories must be previously unpublished (excluding personal websites and blogs). Deadline July 1.

WRITERS VILLAGE SUMMER SHORT FICTION CONTEST $24 ENTRY FEE. $4,800 First prize. Second prize $800, third prize $400 and 15 runner up prizes of $80. The top 50 contestants also get a free critique of their stories. Judges include Lawrence Block, a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and Jill Dawson, Orange and Whitbread-shortlisted author of eight novels. Winning stories showcased online. Any genre of fiction may be submitted up to 3,000 words, except playscripts and poetry. Entries are welcomed world-wide. Deadline June 30.

The Golden Quill Awards: Entry fee $15. Two categories: Short fiction/memoir (1000 words) and Poetry (40 lines max) $750 1st prize, $400 2nd prize in each category. Sponsored by the SLO Nightwriters and the Central Coast Writers Conference. Deadline June 30th.

Twitter For Shy Persons—Secrets of Stress-free Tweeting

Twitter terrifies me. Seriously. It’s been described as the world’s biggest cocktail party and that sounds about right: cacophonous, shallow, time-consuming Hell for shy, writerly persons.

But many experts say authors who are serious about publication MUST be on Twitter.

So a year or so ago I steeled myself and crashed the soirée. I now have 850+ followers and a Klout rating of 49. (Not Twitterific, but respectable.) And it’s where I get most of my blog traffic. Ten times more readers find this blog through Twitter than click through Google.

BUT I HAVE NEVER ONCE TWEETED WHAT I HAD FOR LUNCH. And I only spend about 5 minutes a day on the site.  

So how did I do it?

After making a lot of mistakes (and probably pissing off a lot of people—sorry if I stepped on cybertoes) I finally realized that since it’s like a Hollywood party, I had to follow the rules of the classic Hollywood schmooze:

• Smile a lot
• Be helpful and/or funny
• Never look desperate or needy
• Accept there is a caste system, and you will never be a Brahmin
• Remember you can’t go wrong with, “kiss, kiss—love your work!”

Here are my shy-person secrets for Twitter-schmoozing:

1)     Get a good head shot. Nobody follows an egg, so you gotta get a picture up there right away. Actually, it doesn’t have to be of you. I used my Mad Men caricature for six months. But a fun, smiley picture of yourself is best. Skip the glamour shots or you may be taken for a porn spammer.

2)     Inform, amuse, but never offer TMI A profile like: “Retail slave, romance writer, seeker of chocolate” is better than “I’m an English major and overweight single mom who has been a greeter at Walmart for 20 years.” But do let people know something about you that makes you worth following. N.B.: If you write, ALWAYS put “writer” in there, even if you’ve never published a thing, so you’ll be tagged as part of the writing community.

3)     Use your @ownname. This is about building platform, remember? So unless you’re writing books under the pseudonym @shysuzi, you’re wasting your Twitter time if you don't use your name. If it's long, shorten it, since you want to get retweeted, and you’re limited to 140 characters.

4)     Remember paranoia is creepy. I have no idea why people “protect their tweets.” It’s like going to a party in a burka. It doesn’t make you invisible; it makes you weird. If you don’t want people to read what you write, just stay in your cave and keep pounding out those 350K word literary neo-Nazi thriller/chick lit/westerns. When you want twittering, you can get a cuckoo clock.

5)     Don’t just stand there; say something. Trying to get followers with 0 tweets can make you look like a spammer, so tweet before you follow. Not about your 2 for $20 lunch special at Applebees, though. Say something cute and helpless like “Hi there, Twitterverse. I have no idea what I’m doing.” People love to help newbies as long as they’re humble and not selling anything.

Now you’re ready to party

6)     Start by following people you know. Like me. I enjoy following people who only have one follower. If I’m 50% of your audience, I feel special.

7)     Then follow some you don’t know. Like agents, The New Yorker, and Twitter deities like Nathan Bransford and Jane Friedman They will NOT follow you back. But now that you have a couple of followers, that won’t hurt your feelings, right? You’ll learn a lot from their god-like tweets. I like to follow the news agencies like Reuters, too—that way I get breaking news. Not important for platform, but it makes me feel like I’m not wasting my time entirely. But don’t choose too many. Following 500 with only 2 followers makes you look wallflowery.

8)     Whenever you open your home page, check for @messages and REPLY. Old Twitter did not have an obvious @message button, so I didn’t see any of my messages for, oh, probably a year. People must have thought I was the most awful snot. Don’t do this. And be sure to send your reply through the “reply” window, not a direct message. Direct messages should be sent sparingly. They sort of infringe on personal space.

9)     You don’t have to thank somebody for a follow. And if you must, do NOT ask them to visit your blog or buy your book. It looks spammy.

10) Follow people back. I follow pretty much everybody who follows me unless they’re obviously trying to rack up follower numbers. These are the people who’ve been on Twitter for 8 hours and follow 500,000 people. I also tend to avoid anybody with no tweets or profiles; people who tweet random nonsense phrases; car dealerships on other continents, Super! Enthusiastic! Salespeople! and writers with no tweets except “buy my book.”

11) Make lists. This is another place I messed up. It’s really hard to sort and list 800+ people, so I suggest you make lists now and add people as you follow them. Listing is good because: 1) people might list you, too (It looks best to have your list number at least 10% of your followers.) 2) Once you start gathering followers, you don’t have to wade through every single boring tweet to find the important ones.

12) RETWEET, RETWEET, RETWEET. Every time you click on a link to a great blog or read something inspiring, click the retweet button. Also tweet links to articles or posts of interest to your followers (there’s almost always a “t” button somewhere on the page.) This makes you a fountain of knowledge and inspiration. And everybody’s grateful for a retweet. They’ll often thank you and give you a follow.

13) Skip the personal stuff. Social media gurus will probably have me twit-canned for saying this, but you don’t really have to tweet personal stuff at all. I don’t—unless you count my daily tweet about my blog. I learned this from mystery author Elizabeth Spann Craig. She reads 100s of publishing blogs and tweets links to her favorite posts. (Alas, she doesn’t follow me, so I’m not often a favorite, but I love her links anyway.) And: I’ve never seen her tweet anything personal. But she has nearly 9000 followers and a Klout rating of 66. (Nathan Bransford’s is 68 and Jane Friedman’s is 71.)

14) Use #hashtags. You’re much more likely to get read if your Tweets are targeted. (It took me way too long to learn this.) If you want to Tweet your blogpost about editing, leave space for the 10 characters in #amediting, and people who are currently editing their WIPs will be able to seek you out. Other popular writing categories are #amwriting #writequote #writingtips #pubtip #indie #bookmarket, and #writegoal. And there are many more. Look around to see how tweets that interest you are tagged.

15) Spread the love. I don’t actually do this, but I adore people who do. If you have favorite tweeters, give them a mention on #WW, (which means something Wednesdayish) or #FF Follow Friday.

No lunch menus. No sobbing about rejections. Just be helpful. 

And maybe someday you will reach my personal Tweetdom best and have somebody tweet #FalseFacts about you. Like this wonderful tweet from @WendySparrow last Friday.  

#False Friday “Catwoman from the Batman comics is based on @annerallen 's real life story... only less leather was involved."

Not true of course. There was LOTS of leather.

I’m not going to lie to you. Twitter isn’t always fun for non-party persons. And it’s full of ruthless corporate types who are only there to use and manipulate you. People will follow you, then unfollow the minute you reciprocate. (Although an app called Tweepi can help you weed those out.) Others will spam you unmercifully. Or tweet inanities every two minutes. The A-listers will never respond to your messages, even if you’re congratulating them on a recent triumph.

But, like a huge Hollywood party, it provides a chance to meet interesting people who are useful to know. They’re probably not celebrities, and are more likely to be carrying trays of canapés than flashing bling and touting their latest project. But they may visit your blog later and you might even become friends.

Friends are good. Even if you never do publish that book.

How about you, fellow scriveners, do you tweet? Are you a shy person? What DID you have for lunch?

Coming Soon—in two weeks, I’ll have another guest post from a bestselling author: Ruth Harris. Ruth has not only had several books at the top of the NYT Bestseller list, but she also worked as an editor at several Big Six Publishers, so she has all the inside skinny. She’ll blog about REJECTION, and what it really means. May 22. Watch this space!