twitter tools

Nobody reading your blog? 10 reasons to persist!: Tne more than valid reasons to keep blogging, even when the only person commenting is your mother.
12 Places to Find Fabulous Content: Some good stuff here that’s adaptable to whatever type of blog one might be working with. “Your own bloopers,” for example, is a nice one.
How to Use Social Media Listening to Create Better Content for Your Audience: Along the same lines, identify relevant topics to write about on social media as well as identifying influencers and building relationships.
How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You’re Not a Big Shot): If you’re trying to build your authority — as well as links to your website — getting interviewed is a valid strategy. This should help get you started, but be aware it requires a little bit of brazeness.
Content Distribution Tools: A variety of additional ways to share content, such as a list on List.ly
13 Experts on How To Promote Content Before Hitting Publish: Some of these steps seem more actionable than others, but some useful stuff to think about when strategizing content production.
7 Practical Ways to Find Content Your Followers Will Love: Primarily about tools rather than different approaches. Covered are Buffer, BuzzSumo, ContentGems, Feedly, HootSuite, Klout, and Swayy.

Community
Building a Sustainable Community. As a sometimes moderator of the SFWA boards, and the person the moderators currently report to, I keep an eye out for interesting or useful community building pieces. This is one,although it’s aimed at a community of fans.

Privacy and Security
No one knows where it came from, but there’s new spyware called Regin out there, and it is widespread in crucial industries such as energy, telecom, hospitality, and travel. It’s there and actively monitoring, but experts don’t know why. “Once they [Regin’s operators] gain access, they can remotely control a person’s keyboard, monitor Internet activity, and recover deleted files….O’Murchu said Regin is part of a disquieting trend of government-written and government-enacted malware.”

Social Media
What Is Pinterest? A Database of Intentions: An interview with Evan Sharp, one of Pinterest’s co-founders, about the image-centered social network. “What’s cool is that because every object was put there by a person. It’s not the largest inventory in the way that maybe a nerd like me would get excited about. But everything that’s on there, at least one human found interesting, so there is a very good chance that at least one other human is going to find that interesting. So, it’s a good set of objects. It’s the world’s largest set of objects that people care about.”
I put a couple of Twitter-related blog posts out in November. They were Twitter Basics and Best Practices and The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping: My thoughts on some Twitter best practices.
2014 Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet: “Understanding why you should use images is the easy part. It’s the mastering of how to actually do it that can be tricky. In addition to finding the right images to post, tweet, pin, and share across your different networks; you also need to figure out the right dimensions for your images, as well.” That’s pretty dead on, which makes this a very useful resource.
The 10 Latest and Greatest Social Media Strategies to Boost Your Results and Save You Time: Some useful and interesting stuff here, at least a couple of which I plan to try.
Social Sharing Powerhouses: Some places (or strategies) you may not be trying, like Guy Kawasaki’s approach of tweeting a piece of content four times over the course of eight hours.
10 Data-Driven Steps To Dominate LinkedIn Publishing: I still don’t feel like I’ve got a good handle on how to use LinkedIn, but this article may provide a decent starting point.
Whats the Best Way to Spend 30 Minutes of Your Time on Social Media Marketing? Unsurprisingly, being able to schedule content plays a part here too. Includes the 12 tasks of a social media manager.
8 Piece-of-Cake Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers: Pinterest remains a social network of interest to me. These are some decent best practices for posting on there.

Technology
10 Boring PR Tasks to Automate: Some of this is probably stuff you don’t worry about doing, like tracking the click rate of your e-mails, but I strongly suggest automating social media where you can with something like the Buffer app.
What do I mean when I say something like click rate? Here’s a basic overview of terms like click rate and conversion.
List-Building Strategies: Your email list is supposed to be your best place for selling things. Here’s some hints on building that mailing list.
7 Indispensable and Free Website Graders and Content Scorers: Some useful ways to look at your website for weak spots. Very nice to have something to looks at accessibility issues, which is a review that (IMO) websites should conduct every year.
How Big is Email? This big.

I follow links like this in order to keep my next edition of Creating an Online Presence up to date. If you want to track my links as they occur, you can follow me on Delicious. If you’re interested in the next online class on it, it’s Sunday morning, February 15th, 2015, 9:30 AM-12:30 PM PST. The cost is $89 for former students; $99 for new students.

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.