The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping

Image that says 1) Tweet 2) ??? 3) Profit — If this is all that your social media plan consists of, you may want to put more time and thought into it.

Are you a writer on Twitter because you’ve been told you need to be on there? Are you trying to establish “a social media presence” while not quite sure what that involves? Relax and don’t worry. Twitter can be easy and often a lot of fun as well as useful, as long as you take the time to learn some of the basics for Twitter use.

One useful tool for making the most of Twitter is the list feature, where you can sort a subset of your followers into their own group. If you’ve never used it, you may want to start by reading through Twitter’s own basic tutorial on lists.

Twitter lists are a great feature that are worth making the most of. I’ve got a few set up for industry professionals, close friends on Twitter, members of various writing groups and organizations, former students, and people in a variety of fields. But there’s one that is more important than any of the others.

Building Your Followers

A pack of followers made up of people who followed you back because you followed them is not a particularly useful list. You want followers who retweet your content, help spread your message, and who provide interesting and useful content that you may want to share in turn. For this reason, it’s worth putting a few minutes each day into maintaining it. I use two tools to help me do this: Buffer and Justunfollow.

Buffer allows me to schedule tweets (which I also like because I can post stuff when not around and find new followers that way). When I initially post a link to a blogpost, for example, I can go ahead and set up a couple of additional mentions further on down the line. More importantly, I use Buffer when doing my daily follower check, looking to see who’s following me that I want to follow back. I look at each new follower’s tweets and usually favorite a couple or find tweets that I want to retweet, sticking them in my Buffer queue. (I should note that I am not using the free version of Buffer but the next version up, which lets me schedule roughly ten days of tweets in advance.

Who I Don’t Follow Back

I don’t follow everyone back automatically. Here’s the list that’s evolved over time of profiles I don’t bother following back:

Sell, sell, sell. Is your stream full of nothing but links to your book on Amazon? Then I’m probably not worrying about.
Nonexistent. No photo, no background info, no tweets? I’m not going to bother.
Promising me social media success. I’m not buying Twitter followers, nor am I paying for expensive seminars that tell me things that are common sense.
Hate speech. That should, I think, go without saying.

Disagree with me politically? That’s fine. I enjoy conversation. Post nothing but silly puns or kitten pictures? I’m fine with that. I’m even good with total nonsense. This sorting stage is where I build a lot of my lists, though not that crucial one I want to talk about. That one comes later.

The Interactives List

Lists are a terrifically useful feature of Twitter, allowing you to create subgroupsand view tweetstreams made up of only tweets from people on that list. Many of my lists are devoted to either a specific group like former students or players of a MUD I used to work with or an industry niche, like book reviewers or editors. And then there’s the most important list of all.

This list is top of my heap and it’s titled Interactives, for people that interact, who RT and reply and generally signal boost. I try to periodically thank people for RTing, which means running through who’s done it recently, and I add people to it at that point. The people on that list have demonstrated that they enjoy my content and want to spread my message. That’s a very good reason for working at building a relationship with them.

When I’m just poking at Twitter, looking to see what interesting conversations are happening or what content is noteworthy or a good candidate for retweeting, I go to that list first. If I’m filling up my Buffer stream with some interesting content, I can find it there, and continue to build the relationship while also giving my followers interesting and/or entertaining content.

If you’re worried about it getting too cluttered, run the tool I mentioned, Justunfollow, periodically to weed out people not following you back and inactives. That should do the trick for all but the most popular of Tweeters.

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January 7, 2011

The Fisher Queen fished her parents out of the sea one evening. The waves were flat as paint, stretching out toward the horizon. Dead fish curled drying on the sand, scenting the air. It was the dog days of summer, windless. Far out past the sand bar, the sea shaded green, then brown.

She felt one of them lip the bait and the tender fumbling as they pushed it back and forth, mouthing it in inquiry. Then they both struck on the double hook, a rush as sudden as a punch, and the tip of the pole dipped in acquiescence to the water.

She pulled them in using long slow pulls, bringing the rod’s tip back towards her shoulder, reeling in swiftly as it lowered again towards the horizon.

She remembered scraps of childhood as she reeled. Hanging upside from the jungle gym, feeling her head throb with onrushing blood while a cat stalked by in the unmown grass, tail high and stiff. Sneaking off to be with a boyfriend for the weekend, her mother finding out, shouting at her. College graduation, their heads among the crowd. Calling her in her first apartment to make sure she was okay, didn’t need anything. Her father’s funeral, her mother’s only a few weeks later, like a swan than has lost its mate, and so lies down to die.

Now they were fish, as long and muscular as sharks, but toothless, living on plankton and the spawn of crustaceans. Now they thought slower, deeper thoughts than when they were human, and if they included thoughts of the Fisher Queen, they betrayed no sign of it.

She waded hip deep into the tepid water, holding a North Carolina summer’s heat still here in the final days of the season. The fish came to her, floated alongside her legs. She bent to each one in turn to coax away the hook piercing their lips. But free, the fish remained there, their scaly sides rasping along her legs. They were all muscle ““ she could feel it when they flexed a tail in over to stay in place.

She rested her fingers on their brows and let them move in tiny, hypnotic circles. The fish floated in the water. She could see their great golden eyes underneath the surface, staring up at her.

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July 6, 2011

Not sure if this is the very beginning, but it’s definitely in the first chapter.

The rub of metal around her wrists was what bothered Shyra the most. Not the standing with the others, chained on the back deck, exposed to wind and cold. Or the catcalls of the sailors, appraising each Dryad in terms of beauty and body. Or the pull of her home grove, dwindling with each mile of river the boat achieved. She wouldn’t die of that, at least until she rooted and became vulnerable. THe lack of food didn’t’ bother her either, as long as there was plenty of sunshine and water.

They all managed to send their hair down along the boat’s side, down to the water line to drink there. But when the captain was cranky, he would shout that they might tangle the paddlewheel and would order one of the boys to clear it.

The boy would come with machete and apologies to hack away their hair. It didn’t hurt, any more than cutting his own hair would have hurt, but they pretended that it did, in order to use their reproachful cries to make him wince.

They had little enough to amuse them. The Dryads knew they were as good as dead. Dryads and Naiads captured and taken to Tabat never returned. If they wanted to escape, they all agreed in their whispered conversation, relying on the great engine’s noise to mask what they were saying, it would be best to get away before the boat reached the city.

She suspected that the Captain, if not all the crew, knew exactly what the Dryads chained there were plotting. They were not the first Dryads the Swan had carried. The railing was matted with fine, greenish root-hairs, layers upon layers of them in the spots where the boys were too lazy to scrub.

And all along the side of the boat, on the inside of the railing, were pictograms scratched by former prisoners. Some were easy to decipher: Six Flowers, Sun and Rain, Riverfern. Others were harder, lacking an established alphabet. A clamshell might be that, or some other concept, or food, or the sea, and coupled with what could have been a candle or eel or sprout, who was to know the precise name of the former prisoner, fate as unknown as Shyra’s, who had scratched that, in letters no more than a fingernail high, in the space beside the hasp to which Shyra had been secured for the duration of the journey?

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