Friday, February 10, 2012

Twitter Tools for Authors

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2012/02/5-top-tools-for-promoting-your-book-on-twitter/
by Steven Lewis (@Rule17)
Today I have the pleasure of introducing readers to Steven Lewis, another great blogger and self-publisher who I met on Twitter. Steven is a prolific writer, an author and helps people publish their books to the Kindle platform. Today he’s got great tips for you if you want to use Twitter to promote your book. Here’s his article.


The five best tools for promoting your book on Twitter
Twitter is the second greatest source of traffic to my Taleist self-publishing blog after Google. As your blog is also where many of your readers might go before buying your books that promotional power makes Twitter an essential part of any author platform and marketing strategy.
Fortunately Twitter is an ecosystem in which talented developers are thriving by making useful tools. Five in particular have become crucial to me since I realised the importance of Twitter to my success and started taking my use of the network seriously.
Klout
Klout
Klout tries to quantify how “influential” you are on Twitter. There’s room for debate about how Klout measures this but it’s undoubtedly a useful benchmarking tool. I use my Klout score as feedback to gauge how useful I’m being to my followers.
Tweepie
Tweepi
If you want more followers and you aren’t a Kardashian, you have to go out and find them.
I use Tweepi to find people with common interests. If you follow Joel on Twitter, I think you and I might find each other interesting.
Tweepi lets me enter Joel’s Twitter handle — @jfbookman — to see a list of his followers and select which ones I want to follow. (It’s worth noting that one of Tweepi’s premium features allows you to exclude people with a low Klout score, just one indication of how Klout is becoming important in the Twittersphere.)
Naturally I’m hoping that this is reciprocated and that you’ll follow me back. I’ve met some great people this way.

Tweriod
Tweriod
Having made all these new friends I want to know to know when the best time to connect is. I have followers all over the world and there’s no point tweeting when most people offline.
Tweriod will give you a report of when your followers are most active so you can concentrate your tweets around those times or at least hold off the most important ones till they will reach the biggest audience.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite
For me 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. turns out to be a good time but I’m exercising and having breakfast then, not tweeting.
Hootsuite lets me schedule tweets so I can be sure messages are going at the best time. When I write a blog post, for instance, I tweet three times in 24 hours so I reach all time zones.
With Hootsuite I can also have a column for each of my lists and columns for replies and direct messages. This is important to me because there are some people I follow especially closely and I want to see all their tweets. That’s hard to do when you’re receiving tweets from thousands of people.
TweetDeck has similar features.
Buffer
Buffer
Tweeting links to content that self-publishers will find interesting requires finding those links in the first place. I do this mostly in the evening while I go through my RSS feeds on my iPad. If I tweeted all the links as I found them, I’d be sending out a burst of tweets. This would be a shell burst that might overwhelm followers who were awake and I wouldn’t reach any followers who are active at other times.
Ideally I would spread these tweet out over the day but with a focus on the times when Tweriod has told me they’re most likely to be useful. This is exactly what Buffer lets me do. I send the tweets to Buffer and it rations them out to a schedule I set.
Tweeting with Klout
You might have soldiered through all that and thought it’s too complicated. If you do feel that way, maybe pick a couple of ideas and work on those. I can tell you that my Klout score was 40/100 when I started and it’s now about 50. That might not sound too high but wait till you try it till you judge!
What are your favorite tools for promoting on Twitter?
Twitter TipsSteven Lewis writes the Taleist self-publishing blog, where you can sign-up for his social media check-up, a free email course showing you easy ways to make sure you’re using social media to maximum effect in promoting your books.

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