Copied from my original post at ThrillersRus 10/9/11 We all get them, the DM's that are auto generated that hit our DM Twitter mailbox after we follow someone, or retweet their tweet. These DM's are impersonal, not directed at us, but are rather in a way spam with a small s. They ask us to check out their blog, which I probably did before if I chose to follow them, or thanking us for following them, but it's impersonal since it's auto generated and they probably haven't looked to see who I am or whether we should be following each other.
Or we get the real Spam DM from someone we follow after their account has been hacked and we get a message with a link to a supposed terrible picture of us or the bad blog post about us, trying to entice us to hit the link to see what how we were slammed.
If you really want to thank me for following you, send me an @dougdorow with something personal in it, let me know you checked out my book or blog or start a conversation.
I believe DM's should be used for those private conversations in this Twitter party-line, sparingly, for particular reasons. Instead I need to sort through the spam DM's to find the real ones I care about.
Don't use DM's to spam (with a small s) your followers. It starts the relationship off on the wrong foot, which is exactly the opposite of what you were trying to get across with the DM response to the new follow. I don't like getting those types of DM's so I don't send them, do you?
From my original blog post at ThrillersRus 8/21/11
This weekend I met with a writer friend of mine to talk about her moving forward into e-publishing and leveraging social media to market her work. She knows facebook and has a blog, but I told her she needed to leverage Twitter as well. I started on twitter 10 months ago and shared some of what I've learned. Here are some of the things I think each new writer needs to consider as they start up on Twitter. First of all there's your name; use your author name or some variation of it so people know who they're communicating with and whose book to look for if they want to go shopping. - If you tweet as @mysterywriter, they won't know who that is and they'll have to take another action to dig deeper to find out who you are, and they may or may not do that.
- If your name's too long, it requires a lot of typing for your followers to enter and it letters take up valuable space from your tweets.
- My name is Douglas Wayne Dorow. Most of my friends know me as Doug Dorow. I write as Douglas Dorow. My twitter name options were @douglasdorow, @dwdorow or @dougdorow. I chose @dougdorow because it's shorter and it's an easy leap from doug to douglas if people look up my books.
Your profile, people will take a quick look at your profile to decide if they want to follow you or not. - You're tweeting as a writer, tie your profile into your writing. Mine is short and sweet: Indie thriller / suspense writer, and a link to my blog. Look at some profiles out there for people and see what you like or don't like in some of those you review. You can change it later, if you want to.
The third part is the AVI (avitar) or photo. Again, people want to know who they're tweeting with. Some people put their book cover or a picture of their pet or something else. I like the photo the best. Leave the photo up there, or if you change it, infrequently, leave the new one up for a period of time so people can associate the new photo with your name. The photo is the visual identification of you that your followers will use as the twitter stream flows by. They recognize the photo and stop to read because they like you and your posts and want to see what you said. OK, you have your twitter name, your profile and your photo, you are ready to rock the twittersphere. But where to start?Day one you are following no one and have zero followers. If you tweet with no followers, will anybody hear you? It is time to follow and be followed. One of the great things about twitter is that people will follow back, you follow them and they will follow you. Start doing searches of authors you like, people they follow and who follows them, subjects that apply to your genre, and start following people. Set a goal of following so many new people a day, 20, 50. If you do this you'll see your following grow. To continue and sustain its growth you need to be a tweeter who is engaging, interesting to follow. I have 1,800 followers. I don't try to grow it very much anymore. At 1500 it started to grow on its own with new people finding me through my tweets and people I interact with. As you go along you will want to use twitter tools to unfollow people who aren't following you. Think about it, you're seeing their tweets, but they aren't seeing yours. There may be some people out there you want to follow, who don't follow you, but probably not very many. They fill up your stream with their tweets and don't interact with you, it's all on you to interact with them. You can find tools to use with twitter by googling it. Tweeting: You get 140 characters for a tweet - a good rule of thumb is to only use 120 so that people can add info if they retweet your tweet.
- use a url shorten when you put url links in your tweets.
- Hashtags or the #-sign is another thing to use in your tweets. You'll see them out there. They are used so people can find tweets in a search on a subject they're interested in or can follow a stream with the hashtag of interest in it.
Twitter platforms.There are different apps to use to tweet. - Twitter has all of the functionality to tweet.
- Hootsuite allows you to schedule tweets in the future and a built in shortener and you can see columns to follow different streams.
- Tweetdeck on google chrome is nice allowing multiple columns to track streams. I have a stream for a couple of Lists I created in twitter and to follow a couple of group hashtags I follow.
Twitter really isn't that hard, but it's different than anything else you've used so it may take some time to figure out how you want to use it. Here are a couple of links to other blog postings about twitter.The power of Twitter and groups.Writers and Twitter - They call it Social Media for a reason (I recommend you read this one) Comments?- Newbies - what other questions do you have?
- Veterans - what else do newbies need to know, or what you wish you knew when you started tweeting?
From my original blog post at ThrillersRus 6/30/11
 The power of twitter
I published my thriller, The Ninth District, on kindle and nook a couple of weeks ago. As soon as it was available, I put out a tweet to tell the twitterverse that I'd published it along with a link on where to buy it. I sent out the initial tweet at to my 1300 followers. Within minutes it was retweeted by 6 of my twitter friends and the message was out to another 5,000 people.
I have family and some friends and some of them know how to read and actually like to read. I put out the same message to some of them in email or on the phone. But it was over a week, and they may have told some of their friends, but I don't know it they did or not.
There is no way I can reach as many people who are interested in writing and reading in such a short amount of time as I was able to do with twitter.
1 tweet to 1300 followers, 6 retweets in minutes to 5,000 followers. I like Twitter.
The power of groups
Groups of people form together around a common purpose or interest. They develop a camaraderie. Writers commiserate about the writing process, roadblocks and rejections. They celebrate a great review, a new release and provide companionship while a writer is alone trying to get the words on the page.
One group I've joined and support is the Independent Author Network, which goes by the hash tag #IAN1. This is a group of independent multi-genre published authors committed to supporting each other in the area of writing and marketing and publicity using social media.
Here's the power of groups. (Don't let the numbers scare you) There are 180 IAN members. They have a combined total of 225,000 followers. If we're committed to retweeting each other's tweets we can get a single tweet out to 192,600 unique followers and if they retweet it, even more. Like waves in a pool it just keeps spreading out until it peters out.
Now, not everyone sees your tweet or retweets it, so it doesn't get that big, but with a group it gets a lot bigger, a lot faster then it could on its own.
There are a couple of other groups out there I follow as well; #MyWana and #pubwrite. Find one that feels right, participate in the discussion and support the group and you will feel the power of the group.
There is no way I can reach as many people who are interested in writing and reading in such a short amount of time as I was able to do with twitter.
From my original blog post at ThrillersRus Oct 24, 2010 I’ve decided to independently publish my thriller on the kindle. My goal is to publish it around Christmas when I anticipate many new readers will be receiving kindles as gifts and will be looking for books to load and read. How do I market myself? I’ve started a blog and started to tweet. I’m trying to figure out where to spend my time to try and reach my audience. There are options and I only have so much time. Between blogging, Twitter, Facebook and other options, like Kindleboards or blog tours I need to figure out where I should focus. Here’s a little of what I’ve learned or what I’ve observed recently getting into Twitter. I started my blog September 3rd. The question was how to get people to find it. I’ve commented on postings on other blogs with my blog link in my signature. I’ve become a follower on other blogs that I like. But that seems very passive. I started tweeting Sept 22nd. I’ve tried to find other writers and people interested in suspense and thrillers to follow. I periodically post and sometimes have a link back to my blog. Twitter is much less passive compared to blogging, here is an example. I agreed to be part of the JA Konrath Draculas marketing experiment posting my review on my blog. In addition I tweeted on it. On Monday Oct 18th I tweeted about Draculas and linked it to my blog as part of Twitter’s #mentionmonday. - My Tweet went out to my 140 followers.
- 6 people retweeted it getting my tweet out to 10,565 people.
- Two people who received the retweet, retweeted it and it got out to an additional 10,009 people.
- That’s a total of 20,714 people who got my tweet with a link to my blogpost review.
According to the tiny url stats, 200 people clicked on the link in the tweet to my blog post. Other posts I’ve done have had clicks of 8-20. Tweeting on a topic of interest to others on occasions like #MentionMonday will capture the attention of people on Twitter and help drive more traffic to my blog where people can get more detailed info. More exposure than I would ever get on my own simply posting to my blog.
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