My latest Twittersperiment has several sub-experiments running, but I’ll share what’s going on right now.
1. Permalinks. I was introduced to this method of retweeting recently. Retweets are supposed to be better than tweets for sharing other people’s information. Not sure why, but I know I get a lot more retweets since I started participating in this method. Here’s how it’s done, from the files of one of the retweet groups I belong to.
Step 1: Go to your Twitter profile and post a tweet as you normally would. (Make sure it is in 3rd person. No “Hey, check out my book” tweets please)
Step 2: Once your tweet is posted, click on “Expand,” then click on “Details.” Once you’ve clicked on “details,” your tweet should now be zoomed on your screen. You now have a perma-link at the top of your computer screen that you can copy. Copy that link.
Step 3: Paste that perma-link into the daily thread in the share group you belong to.
Step 4: Follow the links that the rest of the participants have pasted into the daily threads and retweet the tweet that the link takes you to. You must be logged into Twitter for this to work.
When all we do is copy and paste tweets, our Twitter profiles get clogged with a whole bunch of tweets that all look like they are from us originally. If you manually retweet for others, you look more professional and less like you’re only promoting your own books. Also, when tweets get retweeted a lot of times, they get seen by more people.
Another way to create a permalink is to post a tweet and then click on the time in the right-hand corner. It will say now if you just posted it, but you can do this with any tweet in your feed. The permalink screen comes up, and you copy and paste the URL.
2. I have kinda stopped following people. This may seem weird, but I am zeroing in on retweeters, not followers.
3. I subscribe to Social Oomph, a service that, among other things, sends you a list of people who retweeted your tweets. I try to go down that list, click my way to each tweeter’s feed, and retweet something he/she posted. I sometimes find I have a long list of retweeters, many of whom I don’t know and don’t follow. But I still retweet something from them. And they keep retweeting me back. I also get notice of mentions and retweets from Twitter. I jump in and retweet those folks, too. Their tweets, not just their retweet of my tweet.
4. I note with concern that many people are using auto-retweet services. I don’t know if that means that all these tweets and retweets are fakeys going to fakeys. But if I go to a feed that has nothing from the person/profile but “Blah blah uses autoretweet”, I still go to the link in the profile and tweet whatever page that goes to.
5. The Hootlet app. I love this. I installed it on my browser, and I can tweet any page I go to, in fact, I can share it over up to five social networks at once. You sign up for a Hootsuite account but then just get the app and do your sharing and retweeting without ever going to Hootsuite. It works within Twitter to share across all the media you choose, too.
6. Tweet from Facebook. This sets up to automatically tweet your fb posts. Since you naturally talk about everyday, personal, and/or non-promotional things on facebook, it automatically makes your twitter feed look less full of promo stuff.
Please let me know what sharing and promotional tricks you use, and thanks for reading!
FINDLEY FAMILY VIDEO 
Here is my issue. I belonged to a group that engaged in a huge number of tweeting and retweeting. They used every trick of the trade, and I was retweeted to hundreds of thousands of people. I am not exagerating, some of these people had between 100,000 and 200,000 followers. The interesting thing is, my sales did not change. Before the group, during the group, and after I left the groups I am selling pretty much the same number of books. I am at a loss as to how to explain it, but this is exactly what happened. Any ideas?
I have no idea, Ilil. I can’t say I have rip-snorting sales, but it’s averaging more than two a day, right now, almost 30 for the month, which is better than all of last month, I think.
I never argue with success… I am glad it is working for you. Perhaps it depends on the group itself, who knows… I am just finding it fascinating that I sell almost exactly the same number of books every month with or without tweeting. The mysteries of the universe…
That’s great to hear, that you are using roundteam and still “being real”. I’ll freely admit that I don’t understand why the permalinks work better myself. I only know I have gotten tons more retweets since I started using it, from strangers, from non-authors, very faithful retweeters. My followers remain pretty stagnant, but I have been able to get my tweets trending several times by using retweets/permalinks instead of copy and past tweets.
I don’t understand the permalink usefulness. Could you clarify? How is it different from copy and paste? I use Social Oomph and love it. I also you roundteam to RT. It’s not fakey because these are people that I would retweet anyway, it just ensures that I retweet them throughout the day instead of in erratic spurts. I did try out another one but did not like it because t was too complicated to control who it retweeted. I agree that hootlet is great!