Can anyone explain twitter to me?

I keep hearing how great twitter is for book promotion. I have avoided twitter like the plague, partly because I am too flap-jawed to say good morning in under 140 characters. Has anyone promoted their book with twitter? I notice there is a twitter update on this site which caught my interest. How does that work?

Just your basic dinosaur here

 

Eh, Twitter is like any other social media platform: there's a steep hierarchy, with the top accounts having millions of followers, and then millions of accounts with very few followers. So if you don't already have a massive twitter following, I don't think it's going to be a magic bullet.

I do find twitter somewhat useful in daily life, just because I follow a bunch of news outlets so it's one of the main ways I get breaking news (it does have the virtue of being very up-to-the-minute). But I could never use my twitter to promote a book, because the only people who follow me are like 15 people I already know. Perhaps if I was more active about tweeting at industry people and didn't use it as mostly a replacement for RSS readers (*shakes cane at passing youngsters*), I could build up a more professionally useful following. But I think it'd take a lot of effort.

 

My sentiments exactly. If someone wanted to give me a free blast on their big account, I wouldn't turn it down, but I don't have time to build up my own. I also found that promoting my website, which I was told every author MUST have, is the only thing in the world harder than promoting a book. At least the latter is interesting.

What I have stumbled on as very useful are boosted facebook posts, used almost like a blog. That has reached about 100,000 people for a reasonable cost, and since I started in early March, my sales have more than doubled, and I am reaching outside the US. But facebook is also a horrible distraction and a time sink. My wife has taken to calling me "Tiffany" when I get sucked into my phone.

 

One thought on Facebook: Some people, like me, dislike it intensely and would therefore be unable to see your posts. You might want to consider posting that material on a blog and on Facebook. (Or post it on a blog and post a link to Facebook.)

 

I'm very skeptical that it's "great" for book promotion. There's certainly a lot of book promotion on there but how much of it translates to clicks, let alone sales? A tiny percentage.

Anyone who follows a lot of authors (like me) very quickly gets sick of the constant book promotion. Anybody with more than a hundred or so followers (like me) has to start creating lists of people whose tweets they actually want to read, because there is no way of keeping up with a Twitter feed populated by thousands of people. By the time you've finished reading the first page of your feed, 50 new tweets have appeared. It's literally impossible to read everything. With my lists, I only regularly read tweets from about 50 of my 5,000ish followers.

Guess which followers make it onto my list? Not the ones who spam me with book promotion, that's for sure.

So you end up with your book promotion tweets only being read, liked, and retweeted by self-published authors who haven't clicked on it and have no interest in your books, but want you to return the like & retweet on their ads. Someone on here recently described it as a "circle jerk" of self-published authors and that summed it up very well.

I use Twitter in a completely different way. I try to tweet funny and interesting things so people interact with me and click on my profile. When I have books for sale, some of those people will click the link and buy them, because they think they will be funny and interesting. Others will retweet my book info to their followers, not because they want me to do the same but because we've built up a rapport or even a friendship. There are several people I "met" on Twitter and now talk to outside of it because we clicked.

So, my advice... don't use Twitter for book promotion. Use it to build a following. And building a following takes a hell of a lot longer than tweeting a couple of ads a day, so only use it to build a following if you enjoy it. If you don't, spend your marketing time elsewhere.

 

Sounds like a plan. I have exactly same feeling about book promotions on e-mail or over-done ads on facebook. The advantage I have found with the Facebook boosted posts is that every boost reaches a different random audience, so I am not spamming my friends over and over. Last month, I tried taking some historical vignettes from E&D, Roman Indian Ocean maritime trade and a Chinese village of Liqian claiming Roman ancestry, and wrote a few paragraphs, explaining these were not fantasy but based on real history. It was interesting, not like an ad, and recipients could comment and ask questions. That way, it became like a blog, generated a lot of comments and likes to the author page (now about 200), reached over a hundred thousand people so far, and generated not quite 0.1% sales. Nevertheless 0.1% of 100,000 is respectable, and it takes me well outside my circle of friends, which is where many self-pubbed authors seem to stall out. Search for Lewis McIntyre on FB

 

I like using Twitter more more or less passively - I tweet once in a while, but mostly I use it to keep up with what's going on with the publishers, authors and romance bloggers I follow. I'm currently only following 85 accounts, many of which only tweet sporadically, so my feed is fairly manageable. I have been able to engage with readers and reviewers to a certain extent (in fact, being tagged in tweets is how I found out about most of my reviews for Under the Knife, and how I found out I'd won/placed in the Rainbow Awards as well), and have had some great interactions with authors whose work I admire. So for me it's more of a keep-in-touch Twitter account than a marketing tool.

That said, my publisher does a lot of promotion on Twitter - pre-sale announcements, book releases, giveaways, contests, etc. So they at least must see some value in it. They do a bit of promotion on Tumblr but are not really actively marketing on Facebook from what I've observed.

 

What gets me about Twitter is this unstated but open understanding that having lots of followers benefits you in some way (I'm not sure how), especially having lots of them in comparison with how many people you're following. So people play games with their followers list, and cut people off just for the sake of the numbers.

I'm likely doing it wrong. I follow people for how interesting they are and how useful their information is to me and so what if my "Following" list is over twice the size of the one for my "Followers." There are two or three people I probably should unfollow . . . they never tweet about the topic I followed them for and their posts tend to be depressing. But so far I haven't been bothered to do that.

As for reading the entire Home page every day, who on earth has time? My laptop screen doesn't scroll that fast, and most of the material seems to be stuff the people I'm following liked and not stuff they actually posted. And over half of that is of no interest to me. I do a lot with the Notifications, though.

@Tenderiser, when I finally get my book launched I will make a tweet about it . . . or two. Hope that's not the kind of obnoxious book promotion you were referring to . . .

 

I thought it Twitter was this.

 

I got into Twitter for just that reason, to promote my books. It didn't help, or I was doing it wrong. Like someone else mentioned, Twitter is now my major source for news. It is much more immediate, and sources can be easily checked. There is good stuff on Twitter, along with a lot of crap, and some really nasty people (keyboard warriors who would never have the guts in person to say what they type. BTW, the character limit is now 280.

 

Rather than for getting the word out on my activity, I'm finding it more useful for finding out what other authors are doing, and for linking me up with podcasts and websites I didn't know about before.

Still, I admit to the hope that Twitter will help my promotions in some way, once I get my book(s) published. And if it doesn't, at 280 characters I haven't spent a boatload of time on it.

 

Ha ha! Yes. I'm too flap-jawed myself. I'm not a fan of the soundbite. How in hell can you develop a logical and persuasive position in 140 characters? Or whatever the limit currently has become....

I've been on Facebook for years and still love it, for many reasons. I won't touch Twitter with a barge pole.

 

I think that Twitter, like a lot of social media, has become an echo chamber. People follow people who say the things the want to hear. If they start saying things they don't like, they un-follow. The message becomes self-reinforcing and dissenting voices are filtered out. I think this is dangerous, and it's why I don't use social media.

 

Yes, you're right. I try not to do this.

The only people I block are people who are consistently unpleasant, or who are infesting a site simply to cause trouble and who have what looks like a fake ID. I don't mind people whose views aren't the same as mine, especially if they are people whom I actually know. But interaction with strangers deteriorates SO quickly into the moron/libtard/kind of exchanges. When that happens, they're out. I have also blocked people who agree with me, by the way, if they can't remain civil online.

Facebook, for me, is a way to keep in close, frequent touch with my friends and family back in the USA. It now includes friends I've made online (several from this forum!) and friends here in Scotland as well. This is its primary function for me, although now, in the absence of most media which I used to trust, it's also a way to disseminate news. However, checking sources is crucial. I'm afraid lots of people don't bother. Again, including ones on my side of the political divide.

Just had a meme this morning, that said something along the lines of "back in 2010 there were four million children at the age of 13. They are turning 18 this year and will be able to vote in the midterm elections, get them registered, bla de bla." Now I'm no maths wizard, but....

Spreading stuff like this doesn't do our cause any good, really.

 

I think Tenderiser is right, in that building a following is more important than promoting. I've read one or two things on the whole self promotional thing and the real issue is the long term building of followers, regardless of sales in the short term. Use Twitter and Facebook to build followers, who will then be your fan base for sales later on.
Of course the real problem is that it takes a lot of work to do that.

 

What worries me is that the "echo chamber" effect is insidious. A general creep towards a consistent message is too subtle to notice over time, and gives the impression of generally changing views when in fact you're just part of a small population who all share that view. This is the danger - that people don't notice what's happening. And it's why I avoid this culture entirely.

That's different. Using social media to be in contact with people you actually know and associate with in the Real World™ isn't the same as being surrounded by a din of the voices of strangers all repeating the same message.

I don't even know what point that is making other than "get young people voting". That's superficially a good thing, but of course the danger is that the person or organisation trying to encourage people to vote also has a party political agenda...

 

Voting IS a political activity, a right, and a powerful civic responsibility. How is exercising your rights a danger? I encourage everyone I know to vote, to make your voice heard. Here in Texas, voter turnout has been painfully low for many years. Citizens should participate in their government. People in elected positions must know that if they fail their constituents, they face being voted out and replaced.

A perfect example: A few years ago in my city, the city council was making questionable decisions. Many of us became convinced they were lining their pockets and not performing their duties as expected. A petition was circulated, trying to get a special election. The petition succeeded, with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents signing.

In the resulting special election, the mayor pro tem and four other council members were voted out. This was not a partisan witch hunt - it was citizens of the city banding together to remove corrupt politicians.

The "danger" is in people NOT voting.

 

I didn't say it's dangerous to encourage people to vote. In fact, I specifically said '"get[ting] young people voting" [is] superficially a good thing', and that 'the danger is that the person or organisation trying to encourage people to vote also has a party political agenda'.

"Voting is your right and responsibility, so you should make an educated decision about who to vote for, and make your own decision on polling day" is a very different message to "voting is your right and responsibility, and the X party is the right choice for young people, so you should choose party X on polling day!"

Clearly the former is an open invitation to enlighten oneself about the options and vote for who you think is most appropriate, while the latter is an attempt to indoctrinate people to a particular political viewpoint.

 

The thing is, whether you get your news and interactions online or from newspapers or TV shows or friends, you're nearly always going to be gravitating towards what you like or what you enjoy or agree with. I'm not sure where you go to get the opposite view, to be honest. And it's certainly not easy to get an unbiased, straightforward set of facts either. Shutting yourself off from social media doesn't necessarily mean you will be participating in a totally open culture. It could mean you still never get the opposite view.

The only place I can remember getting a variety of opinions was at school, and to some extent at work. And that's only the case if the schools are open to every viewpoint and the workplace is as well.

 

To be completely blunt, I have pretty much disengaged from all media. I used to be very politically interested and read a lot about social issues, but I no longer have any faith whatsoever that there is any such thing as an unbiased source of information on such matters. So I don't pay attention to any of it. I make my own opinion about issues which directly affect me and people I care about, and anything outside of that is no longer of any interest to me. I vote, but generally it's a protest vote for one of the minority liberal parties (like the Green party).

I don't need to be told that I am part of the problem if I don't engage politically or socially. But I don't care. I'd rather be ignorant of these matters than hold opinions which are a result of manipulation by, or of the political biases of, other people.

 

But the thread is about Twitter... I think a certain degree of discussion of social media as a whole is relevant. Though the more recent posts have probably gone off topic, that's true.