Twitter 4 Dummies by Kristie Haigwood

Twitter For Dummies by Kristie Haigwood Pun intended - I used to be a dummy, too. =D I'm going to attempt to make this as simple and painless as possible. If there is something you still do not understand after reading it, you are welcome to email me and ask anything you like. If I don't know the answer I will help you find it. kshaigwood@gmail.com Now, without further ado, here are your TWITTER INSTRUCTIONS: You have to say what you want to say in 140 characters or less. I know this may be hard for some of you women, but luckily you can post as many tweets as you want. Well, until they put you in Twitter Jail for talking too much. **************************************************************************** HOME: Home is where you see what all of your followers are tweeting. You can see what they tweet, but if they ARE NOT following you back, then they can't see what you tweet! You can Reply, Retweet (RT) or Favorite any tweet you see. Your followers will see your tweets on their HOME page. **************************************************************************** CONNECT: Here is your happy seat. This is where you will go to see the tweets that people write specifically to YOU or include your @name in the tweet. This is where you should spend most of your time. I do a lot of RETWEETING from this page as well as REPLYING. **************************************************************************** DISCOVER: Here you can read about the big news going on in the world while you are playing around on Twitter. This is also a good place to use Hashtags. I'll give hashtags a paragraph of their own. Don't worry. But to search for a certain hashtag you need to use the search box at the top of the DISCOVER screen, example: #bodybuilders, then search. **************************************************************************** ME: Me is just what it says, well, not me, actually YOU, but that wouldn't make any sense if YOU was at the top of the screen, now would it? Didn't think so. Me is a place where you can find everything that is yours: your lists, your favorites, your followers, who you are following, your tweets, your recent images, etc. Don't let it overwhelm you. You can do this. Just take a breath, relax and browse. **************************************************************************** #HASHTAG: Don't be scared. They will be your best friend after you learn to use them. When a '#' is placed before a word it becomes a hashtag. Using them gets your tweet seen by more than just who is following you. For instance, if you are doing a promo day for your book, your tweet might look like this: #Free (Book Name) is free on #amazon (date) #mystery #suspense #pnr #freeebook #kindle (link to book) That may be a little over 140 characters, but you get what I'm saying. I hope. This tweet will be seen on hashtag pages that people search for the words, free, amazon, mystery, suspense, pnr(paranormal romance) freeebook & kindle. There are thousands and thousands of words you can use as a hashtag. Think of it as google. You go to Google and type the word 'mystery' in the search engine box and it is going to bring up everything about mystery. The hashtag just targets the category so the people that want to know about that particular thing can find people that are talking about it. People search for things they are interested in by using the search box on the DISCOVER page. They don't have to be following you to see your tweet if they searched for #freeebook and you have included that hashtag in your tweet. It will be right there with all the other tweets that contain #freeebook. Understand? If not, read it again. **************************************************************************** FAVORITES: If you see something in your timeline(Connect page) or on your home page that you like or you want to save for later, maybe a joke or someone is having a promo day the following day and you want to help them out by retweeting or grabbing the book for yourself, then you can FAVORITE the tweet, and it will go into the favorites section on your ME page. I favorite my own tweets because the twitter on my smartphone will let me share the same exact tweet the next day and the day after, and so on and so forth without having to write it out all over again. Very useful tool, those smartphones. Smarter than me. Heh, who knew? **************************************************************************** LISTS: Very IMPORTANT for you, Indie Authors. Pay attention to this if you haven't listened to anything else I've previously said. On your ME page, on the left, you will find under your beautimus picture, Following, Followers, Favorites, Lists & Recent Images. We are focusing on Lists. Don't get ahead of me, now. If you've never seen this before we are going to make your first list now. Click Lists / Click Create List / Name the List 'RETWEETERS' It's done! On your CONNECT page you will see when someone RETWEETS a tweet you posted. It will say something like, @Kshaigwood Retweeted you. You will want to add @Kshaigwood to your List of Retweeters so you can repay the favor by retweeting one of their tweets, and HOPEFULLY they will retweet you again. I have about 150 people in my RETWEETERS list as of now, and I add more retweeters to it every day. BTW, @Kshaigwood is me and I do follow back and retweet, so you can add me if you want. Feel free to ask me to add you to my RETWEETERS list. I don't mind. How to add people to lists: Click on their profile picture or @name. It will take you to their profile page with their beautimus picture. Beside their FOLLOW button you will see a white box with the silhouette of the top half of a man. Click that. Then click Add or remove from lists and click the little box beside RETWEETERS you just made. That person is now in the RETWEETERS list. The circle of RETWEETERS: This is just something that I call us, because, well, that's what we do. I have around 150 people in my Retweeters list. I try to retweet at least twice a day; the more the better, for you and for them. Here is why: I go into my list of RETWEETERS each morning and retweet the people that have tweeted something. I try to retweet about 40 different people, at least. When I finish with my retweets I tweet 3 - 6 tweets that I would want retweeted, whether it's something about my book or maybe a friend is having a promo day and really needs the exposure. Then I leave twitter alone for a while. Most all of the time, the people I retweeted will come to retweet me back, and it saves them time if my tweets are right there at the top where they can easily be found instead of having to search through a bunch of retweets first. You are welcome to go to my page, then click on my lists, then my RETWEETERS, then List Members. That will show you who I have in my list of Retweeters and you can add them to your list by using the little white box beside the follow button beside their name. I suggest you follow them as well. They are all great peeps and they all follow back. Any other list you want to make you would do it just like this. Say you want to make a celebrity list and add bestselling authors, singers, movie stars to it. You can do that and read their tweets without having to actually follow them. **************************************************************************** If you don't know it yet, Twitter will only let you follow 2,000 people before they slam on the breaks for you. I was like, O_O WTF? Why can't I follow any more people? You can. You just have to get more people to follow you first. The follow/follower ratio has to be within like a certain percentage after 2k. Get past that and you will have Twitter figured out. Einstein won't have shit on you. I learned a lot just trying to get 2,000 people to follow me. I seriously wanted to throw myself a 2k PARTY!! Balloons and all. Shut-up! I'm making this easy for you so you won't feel like giving the Twitter bird 'the bird'. How to get the bitches to follow you: *I'm sure you see all the time something like this: #FF @kshaigwood @ellamedler @Trish_Dawson @LindsayAvalon @Twoodwriter. First of all, people are suggesting you follow these people because they are real people and they will 'more than likely' follow you back. So follow them. Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but if they don't I am going to give you an easy way how to get rid of them. *So, you are following 2k and twitter says, "Sorry, you cannot follow that user at this time." They are not sorry; they just want you to pull your hair out trying to figure out how you CAN follow @BrittneySpears, or whomever (oh, and she will so not follow you back, so I don't suggest following her. Just sayin'). And here is the key. www.manageflitter.com Make sure you read that right, too. It will pull up everyone that YOU are following that IS NOT following you back. You click on the square beside their faces and then over on the right you will click on that UNFOLLOW button. Now, back when I began using it there wasn't a limit to how many you could unfollow, but I think you can only unfollow 100 a day until you get your #'s way up there. But this does help. A LOT! There are other sites out there that does it, too, but this one works for me, so this is the one I'm suggesting to you. Do whatever you want after you get as good as me. Don't roll your eyes; I'm the teacher here. Mwah! *So, we've unfollowed the people that aren't following us. What next? Follow more people. Not 20-50, I mean 500. Go crazy adding people. Adding other writers is a good thing. If you help them, they will help you. That's a fact, and if you're an Indie Author then you need all the help you can get. Am I right? I thought so. So we're following all the Indie Authors (not bestselling authors. They don't follow back) we can. Follow the people that are following 'Bestselling Authors' in the same genre you write in. If they like to read them, they may very well like to read what you have written. Right? Right. (J.R. Ward, Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris are just a few bestselling authors that write in the same genre I write in. I would look them up by clicking on 'CONNECT' at the top of my Twitter screen. Click on the search box over to the right and type in a name, example: Laurell K. Hamilton, then click on the one that is actually the person you are looking for. When their page is before you, don't follow them, but do click on their FOLLOWERS. You can just go down through the list and follow, follow, follow. 1. Follow the people that other followers suggest you follow. 2. Follow other Indie Authors. 3. Follow the people that are following Bestselling Authors. 4. About a week later, use the www.manageflitter.com and unfollow all the people that didn't choose to follow your awesome ass. How dare them! 5. Oh, Twitter also does this awesome thing where they make you unfollow people at random (FYI, that was heavy sarcasm. It's not awesome. It's a pain in the ass.) If this happens you can use www.tweepi.com and follow back the people that are following you. I hope I've explained it well enough. Take it one step at a time. You will get the hang of it, then be, like, OMG, I really was a DUMMY! UGH! Thanks, Kristie! Find me here: FOLLOW! FOLLOW! FOLLOW!