Writting for Twitter #3

How do you build a Twitter following? In this post, I describe a six-step method. By following these steps last summer, I built my Twitter following from 1 to 450 in three months. More importantly, I'll describe why I built a Twitter presence and what I hope to accomplish with it. First some background:

In the beginning there was e-mail. And it was good. If I wanted to send you a message, I would simply fill in your address and press Send. Done. I didn't need your permission to send you a message.

Then spammers came on the scene and spoiled a good thing. They sent out e-mails by the millions, clogged in-boxes and made themselves very annoying.

Then, in reaction to spammers, the opt-in concept was born. By law, senders of e-mail broadcasts needed to get permission from recipients before they could broadcast. My ExcitingWriting Advisories are opt-in e-mails that I broadcast to more than 2,000 people every month.

Along came Twitter, and turned everything on its ear. With Twitter, you, as a sender of short e-mail messages, have absolutely no power to send anything to any specific person. Twitter is opt-in on steroids. Twitter lets recipients, and only recipients, decide from whom they wish to receive short e-mails. In Twitter language: Users follow whomever they want. After they click on a "follow" button, they begin receiving the tweets that the person they're following sends out.

A businessperson who wants to use Twitter to drive his or her business is powerless to send tweets to anyone. Is that a recipe for effective marketing? Wait. I'll explain.

Last summer, I decided to see if I could build a Twitter following. I attracted 430+ followers in about three months. My purpose: To learn how Twitter works so that when the novel I am writing is published, I can use Twitter to turn what might otherwise be a moderately selling novel written by an unknown author into a runaway international best seller. The novel is not completed, mind you. I have neither an agent nor a publisher. Technically speaking, I have no idea if it will ever be published. I didn't let that stop me. Last summer, my objective was put Twitter through its paces, thinking of it as something between a workhorse and racehorse, to see what it could do.

Now for some background on literary pursuits: If you insist on thinking of a novel as only an artistic endeavor, please check that opinion at the door. Of course, writing it is the work of an artist, but, once completed, marketing it is very much a business enterprise. And those of you who believe that marketing a novel should be left to the company publishing it, Oh my, how times have changed. Today authors of non-fiction books are expected to develop and execute their own marketing plans. It would only be considered a plus by a publisher if a novelist did that much or more. First novels are rarely afforded marketing budgets. The typical first novel spends only seven weeks on the shelves of a bookstore before it is remaindered. Hey, everybody: A novel is a product. It's a product of the entertainment industry. If it's promoted, and if it provides satisfying entertainment to its readers, it could catch on nationwide and, subsequently, worldwide, translated into 17 languages. If it is not supported with marketing, it could die an early death. A lot is at stake because it takes years of sustained effort to write a novel. (And as I said, it only gets to be in the bookstores for seven weeks.) If it flops, you can't just come back next year with another. Many novelists have difficulty getting their second novel published if their first one doesn't sell. So here's the deal: I'm not waiting for a publishing company to kick in millions of marketing dollars. I intend to actively engineer a bestseller using social networking platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Face Book in a coordinated, strategically focused campaign. I'll only have one chance and a seven-week window.

Not having a published novel to market last summer, my fallback position on Twitter was to see if I could attract a community of artists, including writers of all stripes, singer-songwriters, literary agents, editors, book lovers, readers, fine artists, etc. Who would be more open to talking about an interesting novel (once it came out) than writers, artists and readers? Or so my thinking went. Luckily, I had the content of my ExcitingWriting Advisories to attract them and turn them into followers. Typically, writers appreciate someone who sends them witty140-character writing tips. All I had to do was slice and dice the content of my EWAs into 140-character pellets, not that difficult a chore. So, last May I began tweeting helpful writing tips to my one-and-only follower at the time, John Wise, who encouraged me to get started with Twitter.

Within a few weeks, I began to build a following and a method that worked for me. Just as importantly, I began to follow many Twitter users who had thousands of followers and were highly experienced. They gave me excellent advice.

(By the way, I found the Twitter community highly collegial. If you're helpful to the people I affectionately call "twits," they will bend over backwards to be helpful to you. Two ways they can be helpful: RT and FF. RT means they "retweet" your tweets to their followers, which spreads your thoughts across Twitter Nation. FF stands for "Follow Friday," a ritual where each Friday Twitter users list the people they follow that they like and admire as a recommendation to all the others that follow them. You can pick up a lot of new followers if you're "FF'd." It's no small thing in the Twitter world.)

Here's the six-step formula I created that I believe can work for anyone wishing to attract any focused following on Twitter:

#1. After you set up your profile, issue 15 tweets. Don't worry that you don't have any followers at this point. Make sure your tweets are hitting all the brand attributes you want to cover. (Remember what I said in Writting for Twitter #1: Your tweets are your brand, and Twitter is all about branding.) In my case, given my ExcitingWriting brand, I made sure my tweets were helpful to writers—covering grammar issues and higher-level writing issues:
• How to get started
• How to manage large writing projects
• How to take criticism
• Principles of writing
I developed about 50 tweets. I tried to make them sound like aphorisms. Example: "Sentences that begin with the word 'There' are usually weak. Revise." Within the tweets, I put in plenty of links back to my blog so folks could read more.

#2. Ask someone you know, a friend who is on Twitter, to go to your profile and follow you. When they do, you'll get an e-mail message that that person is now following you. That's your first follower. Congratulations!

#3. Use the "Find People" button to search for people you know who might be interested in following you or in receiving your tweets. These may be people you know personally and who know you, or people you just know of.

#4. When you find those people, click on their profile and read their stream of tweets. If you like what they're writing or find it useful in some way, follow them. Click on their "Follow" button. You'll start to see their tweets in your stream.

#5. Once those people are notified that you are following them, typically they will click on your profile and look over your stream. They are looking at your brand. Even if you issued those tweets when no one was following you, that doesn't matter. If what they read in your stream is interesting, quirky or attractive to them in some way, they may follow you back. When they do, your follower count on your profile will increase by one. You're on your way to building your following. But here's the trick: It's not about the numbers. It's more about building a community of like-minded people. In my case, I built a community of writers, artists and readers.

#6. Use the # mark to dip into tweets of people that have something to do with your interest. In my case, I searched "#writing" and "#books" to find people talking about these topics. I went on their profiles to examine their tweets. If I liked what I read, I followed them. And once I did that, most followed me back because when they looked on my profile, they saw a brand that was out to help them.

Does this sound like work? It is in a way, and believe me, while I'm using this six-step method, I run into plenty of Twitter users who do nothing more than talk about last night's Grammy awards show with other folks who are searching on #Grammy to find what's being said, and then following those people. And there are plenty of users who tweet their #Grammy opinions to their followers. That works fine for them. It's a lot less work and a lot more fun, I suppose, for them to build a community of like-minded people. But then, think about my larger purpose in building my Twitter community. What's a bestseller worth?

To use Twitter for business, you will need to attract a defined audience by supplying them with information that is useful to them. Thus, my approach of giving writing tips to attract writers.

Here are some other examples:
• A home improvement specialist can give tips on insulation
• A personal trainer can give tips on how to avoid getting injured while exercising.
• A physician's assistant can give tips on how to avoid getting the flu.
It's pretty obvious. The deeper wisdom is this: People who are out to sincerely help others do well on Twitter and get what they want in exchange.

Now here's the kicker for me and Twitter: I am not currently using Twitter. As I built my following to 400+, I lost interest. I learned everything about Twitter I was able to at this point. Until my novel is about to come out, I've decided I have better things to do with my time. Note: With more than 80 million Twitter users, 85 percent post less than one update every day. (That's me!) Also, 73 percent of all Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009. (That when I joined.)

Why am I not currently using Twitter to promote my freelance writing practice? I'll answer that question next month. I'll also describe practical ways you can use Twitter to drive your business. And I'll reveal methods anyone can use to help turn a published novel into an international bestseller that Hollywood then turns into an Academy Award winning film staring George Clooney. (Thinking big is not my problem, folks.)

And when I accept that Academy Award for screenplay adapted from a novel, I'll thank John Wise for getting me started with Twitter. I may mention my mother and Gina, as well. Oh, and also...