Thursday, March 22, 2012

How Twitter Works For Writers

Back in 2009, I decided that I should look into the whole social media "thing." To that point, though I'd been an active web user since its very early days and an active computer message board user back into the 1980s, I hadn't gotten involved with MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. So, with our usual summer lull around here (fewer activities to drive our children to, no classes for my wife to attend) I decided to put some time into seeing what social media was about. I signed up for Facebook, played around with Twitter some, and started a blog. Of the three, only Facebook "took" back then. I stopped both blogging and actively tweeting late that summer, though I did get back onto Twitter before too long, primarily to chat about hockey.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2011. I dive head-first back into the world of writing and, while doing so, I start this blog and also begin to use Twitter for having writing-related conversations. Both have been very important to me during the past half-year. The blog has been great for giving me an opportunity to think about writing topics in some detail and have discussions which go more in depth. Twitter, on the other hand, is much more casual and "social" and has been a great place for making connections with other writers for the purposes of general conversation and also mutual encouragement and support.



I know that some people use Twitter heavily as an advertising platform. I assume that it must work for them, at least to some extent, or they wouldn't keep doing it. However, I think that an awful lot of advertising tweets (the term used to describe an individual Twitter message) are simply annoyances to viewers. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with an occasional tweet about a publication that you have to help readers find it. The key word there is occasional. Keep the majority of your tweets conversational and I would expect that you'll be much more likely to engage other tweeters.

If you're new to Twitter, one thing that helps to understand is the concept of the hashtag. Hashtags have the pound (or "hash") sign (#) followed by some text. So, #amwriting would be an example of a hashtag. What these tags do is help organize conversations. Unlike a message board, there are no built in groups or discussion threads on Twitter. Everything flows in one big stream. But when people choose to use a hashtag to mark tweets on a specific topic it helps bring the discussions around that topic together since, when you search for that hashtag, you'll find the relevant tweets. Some of the big hashtags around writing are the aforementioned #amwriting as well as #writetip and #pubtip. (A Google search for "hashtags for writers" will help you find many other relevant hashtags.)

Something else worth understanding is how "@" messages work. If you start a tweet with the @ sign followed by someone's Twitter ID, then you're signalling that the tweet is for that person. Now, it's not private. (For a private message, you'd need a Direct Message and you can only send those to people who follow you. You can publicly "@" message anyone on Twitter.) These "@" tweets show up in searches and, if someone is following both you and the person who you "@" messaged, then the "@" message will show up in their Twitter timeline as well. This allows for a lot of great multi-way conversations to develop between clusters of people.

I've found some awesome beta readers through Twitter conversations and during November, having lots of other writers around to participate in writing sprints was great for motivation. I've also made friends on Twitter, people who I've never met in person, but who I enjoy the virtual company of all the same.

I know I've heard some people say they don't "get" Twitter. The 140-character format and the hashtags can be a bit confusing at first. But I believe that for writers, it's worth giving Twitter a real try to see if they can make beneficial connections with their peers.

17 comments:

  1. I love Twitter but I agree -- the ones that are solely shilling platforms do nothing for me. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm also bothered by the ones that link to their blog posts 10 times a day. 2-3 times is fine and normal but 10?

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    1. Alessa, yes, I agree. When I'm organized and have what I think is a reasonably-substantive blog post to share, I tend to go for an evening tweet, a morning tweet, and an afternoon tweet. I think that's a reasonable system.

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  2. I enjoyed this post, and learned a lot about Twitter. I have to admit I underuse Twitter to communicate, since I do that so much on FB and my blog. But this post has given me much to think about. Thanks.

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    1. I'm glad that you enjoyed it and found it useful.

      Thanks for the comment!

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  3. I admit that I'm one of the people that "don't understand Twitter" and I'm not sure that I'm ready to take that leap yet, but I do understand where you are coming from.

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    1. I definitely think it's fair to say that Twitter is less intuitive than some of the other online communication methods. If you do decide to go down that path eventually, though, I hope you find it worthwhile.

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  4. I've been resisting using Twitter because I don't like to jump on bandwagons, but lately, I've been thinking I should sign up for just the reasons you mentioned here. Thank you for the confirmation. :)

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    1. You're very welcome. I'm glad that you found this blog post helpful and hope you enjoy using Twitter.

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  5. I like this approach because this is largely what I'm doing now as well. I tried that advertising route a few years ago as well as the hurry-and-follow techniques that everyone seems to recommend, and failed...
    For me now, I update #WIP500 and maybe a #amwriting or #amediting tag once a day. If I have time I might jump in on a #wordmongering run, but that hasn't happened mostly because of the day job taking so much of my time.
    I would like to hear about your experiences with looking for genre specific beta readers. Right now I'm looking for crit partners for a couple of things I'm working on, but beta readers will be coming into a need in the next month or so.
    Thanks for the post Michael!

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    1. And thank you for your comments!

      As far as finding genre-specific beta readers, most of mine have come from watching for other people who I follow on Twitter asking for beta readers/critique partners. I don't think I've ever specifically thrown my own call for readers out there, though I certainly might some day. (I am, also, talking about short fiction primarily here. So the time involvement in any specific "engagement" is relatively brief...)

      In addition, you could do a search on Twitter for recent-ish posts with phrases like "beta read". (Example search: https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%22beta%20read%22) There will be a lot of "filtering" you'll have to do as 95+% of the tweets you find won't relate to exactly what you're looking for.

      I hope this helps! Thanks again for stopping by.

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  6. Very helpful post. I have a love-hate relationship with twitter, and it goes in cycles of which emotion is winning. I love making connections with new writers, but I get so tired of being bombarded with BUY MY BOOK tweets. I should probably just go through and unfollow the major offenders, but I'm lazy. :-)

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    1. Jocelyn,

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

      Yes, I haven't done a good job of going through and unfollowing annoying tweeters. However, what I have done is created a list which contains many of the people I'm most interested in chatting with. That's a useful technique, though it also has some downsides (new-style retweets, for example, don't show up when I browse that list -- at least in the client I use on my phone).

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  7. Wish I would have found this post back in November. Now that I'm getting into (and understanding) Twitter, I've found that I prefer it over Facebook most days. It's just such a great way to quickly connect with people with common interests. I agree with Jocelyn about being too lazy to unfollow those who tweet "Buy my book!!!" all the time. My eyes just tend to gloss over those types of tweets. Maybe I'm overly methodical, but I have clicked through on profile links for each new follower of mine who lists a blog. If I like what their online presence is about, that is what will make me intrigued enough to maybe possibly buy their book.

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    1. Jeri, I agree that Twitter seems to be more conducive to connecting with new people to discuss things. Thanks for your comment!

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