2. Reduce Posts to Tweets and Expand Tweets to Posts-cross multiply and divide.

3. Twitter Marketing Campaigns: Tell a story, Update status, Attract audience with great one liners.

4. DUH FACTOR-Add Twitter to your blog.

5. Consider multiple Twitter accounts for different subjects.

6. Understand Your Audience

7. Recycle Tweets

On with the show!

1. Verbal Compression & The  Concise Machine

We live in a weird world, writing is an art and thanks to the digital age language is up for grabs. Don’t be afraid to embrace texting lingo on twitter for personal and creative tweets. Embrace the various vernaculars and  say more with fewer characters.  It is a wonderful playground, especially if you have an interesting message.

The mental practice of restraint and conciseness is the sign of  a disciplined writer. It is as important to be actively thinking about conciseness while actually being restrained by a 140 character box in Twitter. This is what makes Twitter such an excellent tool for concise writing practices. Twitter provides a treatment, solution, mechanism and filter for verbose writers like myself.

2. Reduce Posts to Tweets and Expand Tweets to Posts

This one is pretty self explanatory and a good way to recycle written content. You can turn one-liners of a post to Tweet campaigns, and independent Tweets into blog posts. Experiment.

3. Twitter Marketing Campaigns

Writing is transitioning over to the digital realm, which has many dimensions and is constantly changing. Leveraging tools on this medium will mark the success of many writers of today and many more tomorrow. Truth about Writing: like the music industry, it is so competitive, publishers want to use social media as a measuring stick for a writer’s following. Just as you are actively involved in your financial portfolio, you should be actively involved in the marketing of your personal brand, whether you are a writer or not. No matter what you do, leveraging social media tools is an important and employable skill, so learn it, love it and thrive.

You should be attracting an audience to not only the subject of your writing but who you are as a person. It is a social tool so don’t forget to be human. Also, bare in mind that those with 8 million followers on Twitter probably said a few good things that people enjoyed.

Fear not! I will be greatly expanding on marketing tips and tools for twitter in posts to come.

Tell a story, update status, attract masses with one liners.

These are the basic options of Twitter. I use all three methods. The most difficult is telling a story. There are no formal rules for twitter but if you are trying to build your audience each tweet must be able to stand on its own on some level.  It should also be relevant and connecting to the story.

4. Add Twitter to Your Blog

This adds a human/organic/living layer to your social presence on the web. One of the universal characteristics of humanity is our curiosity of others. Twitter provides an enticing window into the lives of others.

For example, I really enjoy John Lithgow. He is one of the most interesting Twitterer celebrities, perhaps because I can imagine and enjoy the sound of his voice and his wonderful roles.  It is also certainly due to the wonderful and cultured comments he makes. Peaking into the other side of the mind of someone we have other contextual knowledge of is an intriguing cultural phenomenon. Relate that all back to a blog or social profile. Twitter adds that window for the world to see you in a “natural” at least different context. Consider this when pondering whether or not to tweet “showering again @ the campsite- a wonderful luxury” The tiny details are fun to digest and should be balanced with stronger writing and information on the page.

There are widgets whose code can easily be copy and pasted into a sidebar or social profile somewhere. These can be found under the app section on the twitter page. There are plenty of Word Press add-ons,  My Space, Facebook etc.

5. Consider multiple Twitter accounts for different subjects.

I am a complete writing nut and write about everything from travel/adventure, to business, to creative poetry, stream of consciousness to non fiction entries and meditations. I simultaniously work on multiple projects and businesses at once and have a twitter account for each. The greatest thing about this is that I can pull from the twitter campaigns for the other accounts and present them as new twitter campaigns in different accounts. This allows me to recycle my work and work smart not hard.

6. Understand Your Audience.

Twitter Truth: In the grand scheme of things a majority of Twitter users have the memory of goldfish. They forget what you typed quickly. This means:

A) Twitter is very forgiving and it is easy to bury a mistake,

B) A Twitter audience is easily lost in a sea of tweets

C) Your most important tweet is the one you are doing NOW!

D) All of the above.

The correct answer is D) all of the above.  The Twitter public timeline provides an introduction to your work.  People get hooked and follow that single neat little tweet you post.  Once they follow you, you must continue to tweet interesting things for a period to convince the audience to keep you around. Now people look add and follow all the time so there is plenty of performance pressure.  Yet at the same time,  the longer they follow, the more forgiving and forgetful the audience becomes. For the most part, they will remember the highlight awesome tweets and let the crap slide. This is the nature of Twitter. However, you can in one Tweet offend the whole world-(I learned the fun way) and lose your audience (which is bad if they are important to you or your work).

7. Recycling Tweets

The Twitter masses are part of a social media movement in front page culture. They want to read the headlines and tend not to dig too much deeper than that.  This allowes you to recycle your tweets. My company (Heroik IT solutions) makes a Twitter Campaign Cycler tool that works to recycle your best tweets and campaigns without coming off as too redundant for your loyal audience. This allows you to maximize your audience growth with a minimal ammount of effort.  It is a burden to do this manually and I’d link to our software if it were free, but flirt with me in the comment lines and I can give you details.