Tag: twitter

New Changes on Twitter

Twitter is our best friend and one of our greatest tools in the indie writing world. With great weaponry comes great responsibility. I’m not here today to tell you how to use a hashtag or tell you to not spam repeatedly, but to give you some insight to some cutting edge changes in Twitter that will go into effect almost immediately.

Let’s start with the new Stories function. Starting now, you can package the best of Twitter into a weekly email digest, delivered to your email inbox. This gives you access to the most relevant tweets and stories shared by the your Tweeps. Many of us use TweetDeck or HootSuite for that function, but this might help us catch a few things that we miss with the constant bombardment of Tweets. Continue reading “New Changes on Twitter”

A Butterfly On The Wall

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!” – Muhammed Ali

The Heavyweight Champ. Photo courtesy of PredictEm.

I was going to title this post “A Fly On The Wall”. The problem is that when flies aren’t on a wall where do they like to hangout? The picture that immediately popped into my mind was that of a fly sitting on a steaming pile of poop or a fresh road kill. This is not the visual I’m going for. Please delete the unsanitary snapshot and replace it with the image of a lovely, striped butterfly gracefully moving its wings as it rests briefly in anticipation of the next flower it will feast upon.

As your friendly neighborhood butterfly I enjoy secretly listening to the conversations around me. This stealth reconnaissance has yielded some fascinating information I would never have discovered had I asked a direct question. I highly recommend developing this talent. This is not to say that if the conversation is of a highly personal nature I want to hear it. There are conversations that cause me to make a quick exit out the nearest door. I don’t want to know the results of your colonoscopy or your recent bout with extreme flatulence. Recently, however, I overheard a useful conversation my son was having on the phone with a friend.

“No, don’t post it to Facebook. Facebook is a pain in the butt; no one will see it on your wall. Use Twitter. Then everyone will know where and when we’ll all meet-up.” Continue reading “A Butterfly On The Wall”

Book Marketing Tips for Authors

K. S. Brooks
What’s it gonna take to get you to buy this book?

There has been a lot of complaining recently about authors who “overmarket” their books like used car salesmen yelling full blast in our faces. This, of course, raises the question: what exactly IS acceptable? Technically, only you can answer that – if you care not to alienate or oversell, the key to making that determination is really “treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.”

That said, I do have some tips for newbies and all authors which will make your efforts more tolerable for those receiving them, and more rewarding for you in return.

#1 – Post book excerpts. Choose a day each week as your book excerpt day. This works great for Twitter and even better if you have Twitter set up to post automatically to your Facebook and other profiles. One Tweet, many social platforms. Not sure exactly what type of excerpt to use? I like to mix it up. Some weeks I’ll just tweet all prepositions or adverbs. Sure, anyone can tweet a sentence. What’s the point in doing that? Continue reading “Book Marketing Tips for Authors”

Tuesday Tutorial: Hootsuite 101 by Troy Stewart

Marketing Strategist Troy Stewart
Troy Stewart

Hootsuite 101- Twitter Just Got a Lot Easier
So you’ve been using Twitter and starting to gain followers. Perhaps you log in every morning and check to see what your followers are saying. Maybe, you even click on hashtags to see what is going on with current trends. That’s great, better than most actually. But there is a lot more that Twitter has to offer.

How do you access the rest? By using Hootsuite.

A Dashboard

Hootsuite is a “social media dashboard.” Basically, it takes up a page or tab of your browser (it is completely web based) and allows you to see Twitter through an entirely different lens. Hootsuite allows you to view Twitter in a “column” view. That is, your home feed, your @ mentions, your Direct Messages and everything else is put into columns for you to easily access. Continue reading “Tuesday Tutorial: Hootsuite 101 by Troy Stewart”