by Catriona Troth: @L1bCat
It took me a long time to get into Twitter. I was resistant for
all the usual reasons (what is the point of telling everyone what you had for
breakfast in 140 characters or less?) but also because I couldn’t get the hang
of how I could focus on people who were saying something I might be interested
in.
I have to say, though, when I was finally persuaded to take
it seriously, it took me about a month to go from sceptical to seriously
addicted.
I didn’t tweet to begin with. I just went looking for interesting
feeds. I started in the obvious places –
the radio channels I listen to, the newspapers I read, the magazines I’d LIKE
to read but somehow never have time for. I discovered that these would often alert
me to articles that were absolutely fascinating, but which otherwise I would probably
have missed. All I had to do was click on the link at the end of the tweet, and
there they were! Magic.
Keeping half an eye on feeds like @BBCNews ensured that I could be the first to pick up on breaking news stories. A quick skim was enough to filter those stories I was interested in and the rest I could ignore. Easy, too, to pick up news from Canada, where I grew up.
Keeping half an eye on feeds like @BBCNews ensured that I could be the first to pick up on breaking news stories. A quick skim was enough to filter those stories I was interested in and the rest I could ignore. Easy, too, to pick up news from Canada, where I grew up.
I started tentatively retweeting some of my discoveries. I
even composed a tweet or two of my own, feeling desperately self-conscious. As
I started exploring some of the less trodden paths of the Twittersphere, the
number of people I was following exploded.
And I started to gain a few followers of my own.
At this point I should probably stop and explain a few basics
for those to whom Twitter is still an alien land. (If you are already a seasoned explorer, just skip
to the end of the indented text.)
Generally speaking, if you put
something out on Twitter, it is there, in public for anyone to see, whether they
have a Twitter account or not. However, once you have an account of your own,
you have two basic ways of looking at the Twitterverse.
If you click on someone’s Twitter
handle (a name starting with @) you will see an image, a few details about
them, and then everything they have tweeted, in chronological order, starting
with the most recent. There will also be
a button, next to their name, which will give you an option to Follow them.
If you now go back to your Home
page, you’ll see the tweets from everyone you have chosen to follow, all mixed
up together, sorted in chronological order and constantly updated.
As I discovered, it’s very easy to get carried away in those
early days following all manner of people.
Suddenly your home page is updating with tweets every couple of
seconds. You can’t possibly keep track
of it all and you’re missing those real-time updates that were the reason you
got excited about Twitter in the first place.
DON’T PANIC. This is where Lists
come in.
Lists allow you to sort the accounts you follow into groups
(and ignore those ones you followed just to be friendly and which turned out to
be a little bit boring...)
For example, I am interested in writing and news about book
awards. So I have a list of people who
tweet interesting things on these topics, which is quite separate from my list
of current affairs feeds. So when I want to see what is going on in the literary world, I click on that list
and I see ONLY the tweets from those people I have put in that list. And when I
want my 6pm news fix, I can switch to my current affairs list.
Creating a list couldn’t be
easier. Just right-click on a name of
someone you follow and you will see an option to <add to / remove from
lists>. Select that and you will see the names of lists you have already
created, with tick boxes next to them, plus an option to ‘create new list’.
Now you are following lots of interesting people. What about getting people to follow you?
I made a conscious decision from the start that I wasn’t going to chase the maximum number of followers. There are apps out there that will automatically follow other accounts for you, so many per day, and weed out those that don’t follow back within a set period. They can ramp up your followers pretty quickly. But I can’t see the point of having ten thousand followers if only ten of them were actually interested in reading what I have to say. So I focused on interacting with people who were interested in the same issues as I was. I retweeted things they had to say that I thought were interesting, and I posted stuff I thought they would engage with. It's a slower, more organic process, but one I hope will result in more committed followers - something along the lines of what what Dan Holloway (@agnieszkasshoes) calls ‘A Thousand True Fans.’ I am still a long way from achieving that, but the goal is there.
I made a conscious decision from the start that I wasn’t going to chase the maximum number of followers. There are apps out there that will automatically follow other accounts for you, so many per day, and weed out those that don’t follow back within a set period. They can ramp up your followers pretty quickly. But I can’t see the point of having ten thousand followers if only ten of them were actually interested in reading what I have to say. So I focused on interacting with people who were interested in the same issues as I was. I retweeted things they had to say that I thought were interesting, and I posted stuff I thought they would engage with. It's a slower, more organic process, but one I hope will result in more committed followers - something along the lines of what what Dan Holloway (@agnieszkasshoes) calls ‘A Thousand True Fans.’ I am still a long way from achieving that, but the goal is there.
[Note that it’s possible to
use management tools like Hootsuite to schedule tweets in advance, or spread
them out. Be careful, though, about
allowing management tools to auto-retweet for you. The things they choose to retweet may not
always be the things you would choose for yourself and it can be shortcut to
pissing off your followers.]
Now we come to some of the more interesting, less obvious
things about Twitter. We should probably start by talking about hashtags. Unless you have had your head buried in the
sand for the last five years, you will have heard people talk about
hashtags. But even people who use
Twitter can sometimes be confused about what they are and how to use them.
In essence, hashtags are just a
way of making it simpler to search for something. Pick a topic – say the love
of reading. You tweet something
interesting about the latest book releases and at the end of the tweet you
write #lovereading. If that hashtag
catches on, and lots of other people use it at the end of what they have to say
about the latest books, then anyone else will be able to type #lovereading into
Twitter’s search box and see a whole load of tweets about books and reading
from all kinds of people, whether they
follow them or not.
One of the most exciting ways of using hashtags, I think, is
in association with live events. People
attending those events can be told to use a particular hashtag (e.g. #LBF13 for
the London Book Fair or #ManBooker for the Booker Prize Awards night) and
anyone, anywhere can get a blow by blow account of what is happening more or
less in real time. So if you wanted to be, say, the first to know who won the Costa Book Award – you could check out #CostaBookAwards.
Twitter can also be an amazing way of connecting with people
you would otherwise have no easy way of contacting.
Call me old-fashioned, but ‘friending’ someone on Facebook
is quite a personal act. It presumes
some prior relationship – or suggests the desire for a future one. ‘Liking’ a Facebook Author page, on the other hand,
is quite a passive act. It places you in the role of ‘fan’.
Twitter on the other hand is both public and
egalitarian. What people say on there is
consciously intended for the whole world to see. And it enables its
participants to engage with one another on a level playing field.
Essentially, Twitter provides three ways to engage with
other users.
As well as retweeting someone else’s
tweet (which simply makes their tweet appear in your feed, visible to your
followers as well as theirs) you can REPLY.
This creates a conversation thread that links tweets together. It also sends the originator an alert that someone has
responded to their tweet.
By putting their twitter name at
the start of a tweet, you can send a tweet to them. This will appear in the list of tweets in
your account, but won’t be automatically shown to those who follow you (or them).
Finally you can send them a
direct message (a DM) which can only be seen by you and the recipient.
Personally, I am not a fan of unsolicited DMs, but they can be a useful way to follow up privately on a conversation
that opened in public.
Because of what I see as the egalitarian nature of Twitter,
it can be amazingly easy to connect with figures in the public eye. Of course, those with thousands upon
thousands of followers may sometimes be too busy to respond (though they often
do). But my first connection with Alex
Wheatle (@BrixtonBard, author of East of Acre Lane) and Horace Panter (@horacepanterart, bassist of the
Specials), both of whom I interviewed on my blog, came via Twitter. I didn’t jump right in and ask for an
interview. I followed them first,
engaged with what they had to say, waited until they had responded to me a few
times so they had some idea who I was.
But it worked! I got my interviews – and much more easily than with
others with whom my only point of contact was with their agent.
Finally, people, I need hardly say, that you should not use
Twitter to stand on your soap box saying, “My book’s coming out; buy my new
book!” Twitter is not about being a market trader on a slow Saturday. As Alexandra Heminsley (@hemmo) put it at Byte the
Book (#bytethebook), it is about ‘creating a generous space around you.’ Be authentic.
Be interesting. Make connections.
