Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Twitter and its many tools...

Good morning from the CHILLY South. One of my Twitter followers said, "What's with this weather? I blame Canada."

Well, South Park the TV series would agree (they even had a song about it) but in the meantime, it is just darn COLD.

Which means I stay inside more. Which means I'm on the Internet more to search for some kind of useful info, connections w/other writers, etc.

Which brings me to Twitter. While I've been a member for many years (@writerscanvas is me) I never saw the great potential with Twitter until recently. There are tools, such as Friend or Follow, which can tell you who you are following, but who isn't following you back. Now, I don't expect celebrities or busy people in the pub industry to necessarily follow me back (though one did - more on that later), but for other writers like myself who aren't super famous, I went ahead and culled out those users who weren't following me back.

There's another benefit to this. You can follow more people--people who you can connect with and learn from--if you keep your list maintained. If you have thousands of people you are following, but 1000 of them aren't following you back, are your Tweets reaching the audience you want?

Bottom line, I am finding Twitter to be a great tool. There are hashtags (#) with items to make it easy to search and find topics of interest. Some writing favorites are:

#amwriting
#writegoal
#indiepub
#selfpub
#indiefilm

And more.

On that note, go forth and have a great day!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stopping in to follow and say hello! I'm just getting up and running on Twitter and taking it seriously. Thanks for the hashtags.

The Writers Canvas, Author Elaine Calloway said...

Thanks for stopping by, Stephen! I appreciate you leaving a comment, and good luck with Twitter. I am still learning all the many tools :)

Elaine