Five Essential Tips to Make the Most Out of Twitter by Donna McDine

As many of us know social networking can be quite time consuming and overwhelming if you do not harness it from the get go. Twitter has become a great marketing tool to get the word out about your business and/or product. Whether you have a service to offer or product (book) to promote, if used correctly Twitter can be an effective way to network:


1. Setting up your Twitter Account: When setting up your Twitter account create a username and profile bio that provides a clear understanding to your visitor what your expertise is. For example my profile bio reads: “Multiple award-winning children's author and Social Media maven who can free up your valuable time so you can concentrate on your freelance writing career.” Not only does it state that I’m a children’s author it clearly shows that you can hire me for social networking tasks.


2. Who to Follow: Research who to follow by clicking the “Who to Follow” link in the top bar once signed in. Twitter will provide you with suggestions and you can also search by category by typing in a title such as, librarian, teacher, parents, grandparents. The list is endless depending on what your specific needs and market are.


3. Be an active Twitter participant: It’s important to be an active Twitter participant by retweeting other tweets. Not only can you retweet within Twitter, many bloggers and website owners have a share button that you can click to retweet their topic. By doing so, the Twitter sign-in page pops-up, you sign-in and the retweet automatically transfers to Twitter and hit click. It’s that simple.


4. What to Tweet about: Create your tweets at the beginning of each week when you are reviewing your marketing plan (i.e., I will be conducting a school visit today and will be sharing what was effective tomorrow at my blog). This provides your follower a call to action by inviting them to visit your blog. Most important, your tweets should NOT only be about your business and/or product. It’s important that you share information that you feel your followers will find important to them.


5. Scheduling Your Tweets Ahead of Time: The ability to schedule your tweets ahead of time so that your networking becomes automated can easily be done through Dynamic Tweets, which can be found at www.dynamictweets.com. They are currently a FREE service and it includes scheduling recurring tweets, which comes in handy so that when you have a tweet you want to send out at different times and dates you don’t have to keep setting it up each time.

About Donna:

My experience in researching and securing book reviewers, writing effective media releases, media kit creation (both online and hard copy), creation of opt-in subscriber boxes, and implementing your social networking campaign will certainly ease your mind for your book promotional needs.

Happy Tweeting! If you have any questions or I may be of assistance please feel free to contact me at donna@donnamcdine.com or visit me at http://www.authorprservices.com/ for additional FREE marketing articles.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Good ideas Donna! I'll have to try out Dynamic Tweets.

Karen Cioffi said...

Donna, what helpful Twitter strategies. I'm still struggling to get my tweets preposted - I use Social Oomph. But, I do share posts and tweets I read that I think my followers will find useful.

Karen Cioffi Writing and Marketing

Mary Jo Guglielmo said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mary Jo Guglielmo said...

Donna, Thanks for the suggestions. I have a twitter account but never plan the week out or schedule my tweets ahead of time. I'm going to try Dynamic tweets. Thanks.

Https://Twitter.com/Do_North

Magdalena Ball said...

Great post, Donna which of course I re-tweeted! One of the things I think I (and probably others) could do more often with Twitter is to re-tweet my own posts more than once and preschedule tweets too, especially when doing a campaign. Using the features of Dynamic Tweets (which I didn't know about) will make that process a lot easier.

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