Let's talk about Twitter promoting!

Okay, so twitter is a little confusing when you first start out. There is some good news though, it gets easy very quickly. Imagine twitter as one long conversation and not everyone is on the same page. Some are talking about one subject while others are talking about another. The trick is to jump into one of those conversations (appropriately of course) and add your own two cents.

Now. If you are just starting out, you'll need to gain followers otherwise, no one will listen when you start to talk. So as you open up your first twitter account, tweet once about how excited you are to be there or what you'd like to tweet about. Basically, just introduce yourself. When people go to follow you, they will want to check out your past tweets first.

Gaining followers is easy. Most people follow back, so start out by following people with similar interests. There is a search field on twitter where you can type in "books" or something and it will bring up tweets about books, people related to books and more. Follow people who seem to tweet about the same things you would.

Next, you  must learn the art of retweeting. Retweeting, is taking one persons' tweet and repeating it, or relaying it to your followers. THIS MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY! People love being retweeted. Why? Because it gives them a bigger reach and gains them followers. If others realize that you are helping them out they are more likely to follow you and when the time comes, they are more likely to help you out in return by retweeting one of your tweets.

When retweeting, be sure to tweet promotional tweets with links, or something that is funny or meaningful. Don't retweet some one's conversation with another person. Even though all tweets are open, (unless some one has a private account) sometimes people hold personal conversations on twitter with one or more of their friends. You must decipher these and other tweets that are not appropriate to retweet.

Now that you are gaining followers, it's time to tweet some of your own promotional tweets. This can be done by hand at first, but you will begin to notice that people follow so many others, that their feed can get super busy and one tweet can easily get overlooked. Therefore, for more visibility, I suggest getting an account with hootsuite.com. You can add your social media sites to this account and schedule tweets to go automatically when you aren't even at your computer. What's more, is that hootsuite now has a nifty little button you can push that automatically schedules your tweets for the busiest times of the day. That means even more visibility!

That's all I've got for now! Come back tomorrow to talk about the sensitive subject of Goodreads.