Twitter

Well following on from some interesting internet discussions I’ve been lightly prodded to give my views on Twitter.

I’ll start off by saying that Twitter is, in my opinion, a massively underrated and misunderstood platform.

Part of the reason why it’s underrated and misunderstood is that there are a lot of people on there who are doing it badly. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m hoping to give some idea of how Twitter can work well, and ultimately how to not be terrible at it.

The Problem

There’s a pie chart of Twitter usage I saw once. It broke down into roughly three sections Self Publicists; Aggressive Self Publicists; and people who update you on every bowel movement. I can’t find the link at the moment but I’m sure it was well sourced and researched. Anyway, it’s funny because it’s basically true.

It seems that what a lot of entities, not just writers but companies big enough to have PR departments that should understand this go through this process when first encountering twitter.

1) I need to follow people, OK, I’ll follow ten people who sell the thing I sell.

2) OK, they just seem to be sending endless tweets about what they’re selling, I guess I’ll do that.

3) Why don’t I have more followers?

4) Twitter is useless.

5) optional I’ll hand over control of the Twitter account to the intern, what’s the worst that can happen? cue hilarity.

But just because there’re a lot of people out there doing it wrong doesn’t mean you have to be one of them and certainly doesn’t mean you have to clog your twitter feed by following them.

Balance

So the first rule of Twitter for marketing is the same as most other platforms. You need to hit the right balance between BUY MY STUFF and other materials. There are numerous thoughts as to how this balance should be but I’d generally say that direct marketing tweets

“Exciting news, just released, Chimney Sweep IV Burt’s a cumin’ available now HERE!!!!”

Need to be balanced with tweets that make you seem like a human being rather than a robot. This is similar to blogging in that you want the ideal impression of the reader to be

“Oh there’s that Girl who makes some interesting points about gender politics and the S&M community, oh and I think she writes some stories too, maybe I’ll check them out”

rather than

“Oh God! It’s that account that constantly cycles through adverts for it’s 12/50/100 different titles full of exclamation marks and hashtags. #KMN!”

Eros Blog has written countless posts about the careful balance of marketing and other content and has, over the years, provided a lot of quite insightful thoughts on the whole sex-positive blogging sphere. As a general rule of thumb though, your direct marketing posts shouldn’t be more than half of your output.

One important aspect in which Twitter differs from conventional blogs is that it doesn’t matter if you don’t tweet much. Unlike a blog where there’s likely to be wasted effort in checking for updates, Twitter loads automatically. If you’re not tweeting, nobody’s annoyed by this (though if you never tweet they may make occasional purges of their ‘following’ list). So you don’t need to worry about necessarily tweeting all the time. Most people tend to tweet in little flurries of five minutes or so. If you manage that every other day, great, if you manage that once a day, even better. If you do it every hour you should probably be getting some work done; that rooftop gangbang scene with the nanny isn’t going to write itself!

What to Tweet

There’s a long and a short answer to this question. The short answer is I don’t know. The longer answer is it very much depends on you. Whatever you tweet, just make it something that indicates you’re a human being. Tell us something interesting about that research you’ve been doing on novel uses for worm screws or how well your oboe practice is going. Even mundane tweets about daily life do the job of making you human and relatable.

Here’s an example. I was writing the other day and had got properly, elbows deep into a pretty filthy scene, I was in the smut zone so to speak, when the phone rang. It was my mother. Instantly I had to close that window, and a few more, go and look out into the garden and have a grown up conversation about my little sisters. After I hung up I posted This.

On the face of it it’s a simple “mothers eh?” tweet. But it says several things at once, I have a mother, like everyone’s she calls at inappropriate moments, and like so many people out there I have to balance a normal everyday life with writing smut. Me, made human in one tweet.

Follows, following back, PMs, etc

I generally try not to fret over how many followers I have. If you have a number of followers that’s a reasonable fraction of the number you follow then that’s fine (I’m currently at about 1:3 on my writer account). If that number is higher you’re doing pretty well, if you’ve followed 2,000 people and have three followers you’re almost certainly a spam bot!

Now, you will get alerts telling you

“The unclean chimney (@SweepMeNow) is now following you…”

That’s a good thing, it shows someone is interested in what you have to say. now, whether to return the compliment by following them is up to you.

A lot of people have told me that following back is just good Twitter etiquette, but I’m not convinced. Firstly it leads to weird self-delusional bubble where everyone’s following everyone and nobody’s reading anything anyone tweets. Second, this tactic is often used by people to try and scrape up followers (if you don’t immediately follow back they’ll unfollow you… because apparently this is a point scoring game to them) and thirdly, because once you’re both following each other, then you can send private messages. I’ve never fallen foul of anyone being unpleasant on the internet, but it happens and private messages are an easy way to be a dick to people. That said I tend to ‘follow back’ more on my writer account than my other accounts, not least because a lot of the people following me are worth taking a look at.

What Who to Tweet

One of the big benefits of Twitter is that it makes it incredibly easy to connect with people. Any tweet you send you can add someone’s Twitter handle (the thing beginning with an @ (e.g. @BigBallBurt) and it will pop up as one of their “interactions”. It’s not the same as a private message because it’s there for the entire world to read, but it’s a way of addressing someone, even someone you don’t know.

Now, of course, if I try to send a tweet to Stephen Fry then the odds are it will be lost in the noise and I’ll never hear anything more. But if someone tweets to a small time writer like me to say they liked that last story but they wish I’d put a bit more soot into it well, gosh and jolly, I might just reply and let them know that the next instalment will be sootier than Harry Corbett and thank you so much for reading.

But also don’t be afraid to join in conversations. If you see an interesting comment on your feed, don’t be afraid of hitting ‘reply’. Before you know it you’ll be in an in-depth conversation with a new friend about the best way of hardening a sweep’s boy’s knees.