How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 3

Hopefully, this will be the last in this series. I'm also hoping the headings of the articles make it easy for you to skip parts you might already know. Here are the other parts of the series if this is your first stop:

• How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 1
• Twitter Works and tips as to why
• Adding a personal touch to your tweets
• Introduction to Hootsuite (and how to use the Bulk Scheduler for FREE)
• An overview of bulk scheduling
• How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 2
• How to Schedule a Tweet in Hootsuite
• The Rules of Bulk Scheduling in Hootsuite

Creating Your First Campaign

I'll recap the 50,000 foot view mentioned in Part 1:

1. Create a Hootsuite account (Hopefully, you've done this by now)
2. Populate an MS Excel spreadsheet with your tweets (template below)
3. Upload the spreadsheet into Hootsuite's Bulk Scheduler
4. Sit back and relax, feeling accomplished *sigh*

Finding the Original Spreadsheet Template

As I stated, Hootsuite provides a template, and I'll show you how to get to that template. DO NOT follow these steps unless you're ready to actually start your 7-day trial. For now, just check out these screenshots and instructions. I have a modified spreadsheet you'll use instead (linked below).

Twitter Hashtags and How To Use Them

Twitter Expert? Hardly!

(This is a republication of the article I posted on my reader blog.)

I'm going to state right up front...I am no Twitter expert. I will say, however, having just recently come to finally understand the concept of how Twitter works AND how other people use Twitter, I'm able to grasp the concept of how it can help me communicate with readers. With that said, if anyone else has anything they can add or correct me on, please leave comments. We can all be better at using this amazing social networking venue if we all pitch in.

Since I'm a fiction author, I'll be sharing this information from the perspective of novels and that portion of the publishing industry, so this article is probably more geared toward the fiction author who wants to learn how to use Twitter to get the word out about their novels, but the concepts covered here can be applied to almost anything, so read on. This article is long, but covers the following topics (click topic to go straight to it, BUT click the MORE button below if you're not in the actual article.):

• The Purpose of Twitter
• How to Use Twitter - The #Hashtag
• Hashtags for Author, Readers, Writing and Publishing
• Leveraging Mentions and Twitter Names
• How to Run a Twitter Campaign (which mentions some Twitter Clients that make using Twitter easier)

How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 2

This article is continuing from Part 1, which pretty much covered some ideas about how to personalize your tweets and not sound like a stream of adverts and a small introduction to Hootsuite, including suggestions on how to start an account. If you don't know what Hootsuite is, be sure to check out the previous post.

How to Schedule a Tweet with Hootsuite

Even though you can schedule messages for the other social networking platforms, I'm just going to cover how to work with tweets for the purposes of this article. Most of this will apply to the other social network accounts.

Why would you schedule a single tweet? Or perhaps just a small handful? Perhaps your readers are in a different time zone and they're awaken when you're sleeping or driving home in rush-hour traffic. Perhaps you want a few timely messages to go out while you're at an event or at work. You could set up a small group of tweets to remind people of a seminar you'll be teaching and you want to be sure they're on time. Telling them to watch for a certain hashtag could alert them on their phones while you're getting ready to teach. Be creative! Here's how you would schedule a single message through Hootsuite:

How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 1

Sorry! Taking a quick break from converting eBooks to multiple formtas in favor of the upcoming Black Friday shopping event. Marketing is timing and I thought this would give people enough time to get their Tweet Campaigns ready for the biggest shopping day of the year! GO TEAM!

Twitter Works!

There is no doubt about it! Twitter is a great tool to help market your books by word of mouth. My friend Catherine Bybee SWEARS by Twitter because that's how her books gained recognition. Go check out her Amazon rankings and see how ultra successful she is!

She stated in a recent Twitter workshop, "People need to see your name 7 - 10 times before they'll buy your stuff!" And Twitter will help you do that! (*Arial clears her throat...* "Arial Burnz...Arial Burnz...")

I would also recommend you get Kristen Lamb's book Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World where she shows authors how to leverage social media as a whole. What I show you here is only a part of what she touches upon in her bestselling book.

I hear some of you protesting, "I've already tried Twitter and it didn't work!" (Or you know a few authors who have and failed.)

Well, it depends on how you measure success. Read Kristen's book and she'll tell you how to do it right. But also take a closer look at what you/your author friends did. First, let's look at who is following you. Most authors have authors following them. We want READERS following us. Authors are great emotional and professional support, but let's face it...the vast majority of us don't buy or read other authors' books. We can't! We have our own books to write and we have TONS of author friends. Just how many books can we buy to support our multitude of friends before we go broke? Authors are not the pond in which you should be fishing. (More on finding and properly fishing in the Readers ponds in another article.)

Secondly, did you have a constant stream of BUY MY BOOK tweets? That can be a sure-fire way to cause many eye-rolling gestures with massive unfollows in your wake or many people ignoring you. It's just annoying, and you'll know what I mean if you watch the Twitter feeds.

In this series of articles, I'll not only show you how Tweet a little more personally, but do it more effectively without spending all day at the computer or on your smart phone. You'll be too busy checking your stats!