The Internet is like a black hole, sucking everything to it. It’s fickle and on the verge of all-encompassing. If you want to find out anything about anything, you Google it. And if you’re trying to establish a fruitful business, whether you like it or not, the Internet will play a big role in that success.
The traditional sense of marketing still exists (when you promote your business, you expose yourself to more potential consumers); however, with social media, you have unlimited access to essentially free marketing. Just by introducing Facebook, Twitter and Instagram into the mix, you can showcase your business—in this case, your writing—within minutes.
Twitter, with its 140 characters, holds you accountable for what you want to say in terms of your business. With limited space, you need to get the most important points in there, so do it quick and do it well. We’re writers. Our job is to craft quick, witty, memorable sentences.
We all have our favorite lines from the pieces we just finish, so when you’ve got something ready, throw an excerpt up on Twitter with the hashtag #newpiece or #workinprogress, or even just simply #write. You want your tweets to fit into something that’s trending but still further your own agenda. If you’re working on a piece that is tied to current events, check out which hashtags are trending (the ones people are using) and add your piece into the discussion.
Twitter offers you real-time communication with your followers, so include them in your own process. Once you reach a milestone or finish a piece, tweet about it. Like with any project you’re working on, focus in on the words in your tweet you consider the most important. Design the perfect tweet, if you will. Like with a blog title, you want to hit hard in the first few characters. So highlight the most important key words by turning them into hashtags (the currency of Twitter), like #writing, #author, #newbook, #newchapter, #launch, or #reading.
Unlike Facebook, I don’t think you can “overtweet,” but I would recommend keeping your tweets or retweets relevant to your portfolio. You can stretch the connectors a bit, but if you’re working on a new collection of poetry, it’s probably best to not tweet about the Real Housewives of New Jersey (as trashily delicious as it is.)
Of all of the social media tools, Twitter is probably the easiest to keep up with and the easiest to keep up-to-date. 140 characters, handful of tweets, and voila, you just made the Internet work for you.
