The first thing to do is to establish your twitter account with the right name or 'handle'. I use my artist name: cjjasp. My twitter handle is @cjjasp.
Once you know who you want to BE on twitter, you need to decide what you want to LOOK like. I use the cover of my book, The Last Good Knight as my twitter avatar, because THAT is what I am selling. At first, just go with the generic look to your twitter page; you can customize it later.
Now at first, when your list of twitter followers is small certain twitter handles will automatically appear in the when you begin to key them in, but once you get past 100 or so followers only your most recent followers will auto-fill when you begin keying a tweet with some one's handle in it. To have my list of handles easily available to me I made a word document and saved it to my desktop. (I will explain the #hashtags further down this post).
@AlisonDeLuca #pubwrite
@Singularityspnt #fantasy
@cjjasp #dnd
A tweet can consist of ONLY 140 characters, including spaces. This is the longest tweet you can make without one of the tweet-extender gimicks that are available on the iNet. This is a 140 character tweet:
A long tweet would run something about this length. I would not be able to write a book here. @homies @friends #wordninjas #ff #helpmeendit
It is time consuming to key a new tweet each time, and folks like us hate anything that eats more of our time. Therefore I also have a word doc on my desktop with a list of 'canned' tweets that I can copy and paste to twitter. This is how one of my go-to tweets on a friday night might appear:
cjjaspConnie J Jasperson
I tweet my book on friday and saturday, and I tweet my blogs two or three times each week. Ususally, though, I tweet other people's books, and blogs on a daily basis. Making twitter friends is crucial to making twitter work for you.
#HASHTAGS
Hashtags are the labels that alert others to what you are tweeting.
Hashtags: helping you find interesting Tweets
- People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search.
- Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category.
- Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet.
- Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.
Thus my message tells others that the book I am pushing is a fantasy book. People who look for cheap kindle books will click on my amazon link because they want a fantasy read. At this point Twitter has done its job! Once they see my cover and read the description the OTHER sales tactics that JD has put in place kick in!
Fridays are a big twitter day. Some people with a lot of followers will really go out of their way to help you gain followers when you tweet their handle with the hashtag #FF on a friday (it means follow friday).
Mondays is #MM (music monday). I am always promoiting my daughter's music and that is why I have a large hip-hop contingent in my followers. They tweet and retweet regularly.
So, to sum things up, Tweet often, retweet often and follow others. Follow celebrities. Dean Lappi has many celebs who follow him! If you don't follow them first, they won't know you are there.
This is really all I know about Twitter. I hope this has helped you. If there are any questions that you think I can help you with please let me know. You all have my email addy, so feel free to contact me personally!
