How to Best Leverage the Power of Twitter

Although Help Me Self Publish has only been in business since September 1st 2011, in a few short months I’ve had a crash course in the best ways to utilize Twitter. I fumbled around a lot in the beginning, but the following tools have substantially increased  our followers and visits to the HMSP site.  

1. Buffer: Buffer has given me freedom. Before discovering it, I was tied to my Twitter account, sending out tweets, reading, sharing, and retweeting throughout the day. It was exhausting and worse, I was bombarding our followers with several tweets at one time. Buffer has solved this problem. My tweets can be scheduled during the most opportune times of the day when our followers tend to be online, too. And best of all, I can schedule my own time more wisely.
   
2. Twitter Lists: Okay, I’m not currently following 1000’s of people, but I’m thinking and planning ahead as I expect to. Creating lists has made it so much easier to follow the people I frequent the most, as well as categorize the content Help Me Self Publish represents: Writing/Publishing, Marketing, and Inspiration for Authors.
   
3. Triberr: When Mary first told me about Triberr a few weeks ago, and how she had met these amazingly supportive people and btw, her blog stats shot through the roof; I was a bit skeptical. But, then I was invited to join and it was everything she described. The people are wonderful, with lots of wisdom to share on blogging and writing, and our stat numbers immediately increased 3-fold bringing with it  additional readership and exposure for HMSP. Triberr will help us achieve our goals at a much faster rate, as if we hit warp drive. (Hopefully, our dilithium crystals will hold out.)     
   
4. Write and Share Quality Information: Of course, no matter what tips and tricks you follow, none of them will do any good if you’re not writing posts people are interested in reading. Since my  main goal is to sift through the noise for our followers, I don't worry about how many tweets I’m sending out, I try to insure that each one I’m passing along is something I enjoyed reading myself.
   
5. Retweet, too: It’s a Karma thing. I tend to retweet over copying and pasting when my Buffer que is filled and/or the tweet is in a category I tend to tweet about less frequently, but was interesting to me none-the-less.
   
6. Be courteous: Thank followers, retweeters, and make sure promotions don’t make up the bulk of your tweets.

Do you use any of the above tools? If so, what was your experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Andrea Bandle
Writer/Editor, Co-Founder

@HelpMeSelfPub
editor@helpmeselfpublish.com

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