Have you been hoodwinked by Twitter? Do you spend hours every day, every week, tweeting or scheduling tweets? What’s the payoff? As a writer, I can lose myself for endless periods of time, tweeting or posting to Facebook. All those hours searching for good content, revising my tweets, scheduling the best time to post, reading other people’s tweets. All those hours lost to writing. Imagine how productive we’d be if there were no social media?
As a writer, I heard that it was important to have a network. You need followers and fans. And, I was told the way to do this is to get on Twitter and to tweet a lot. Like a good little soldier, I tweeted 20 times a day. Twenty different tweets, every single day. I did that for over a year. Then, I cut back to 10 tweets a day. That was still exhausting, but better than 20. I tweeted 10 times a day for four years. My network remained constant. It grew a little but not by the tens of thousands Twitter would have you think. What about engagement? you ask. Not much. People like my tweets. Some people retweet them. Few people, very few, ever comment or send a direct mail.
People hyping their own products. Nope, they’re not interested in me or my books. They’re only interested in selling themselves and their books. It’s shameless. Twitter is shameless.
What’s the answer? Stop tweeting and start writing. Now, I tweet once a day at most. And, I only tweet my own blog posts. Still no one much comes to visit me on my blog and still no one much comments on the posts. People hit the like button and some retweet. But, once a day is a lot better than ten times a day. BTW, my network remains solid. And, believe it or not, it is still growing.
The people you get are not worth having. They are not interested in what you’re interested in. You’re better off taking your time and building a strong base of fewer people. Trust me, those tens of thousands of people you purchased will never buy a book from you.
Good post. I feel your pain. I still tweet TOOOO much. I’ve had 12K followers for several years and have never bought one. Only a handful of them ReTweet and even fewer click to my website. I don’t sleep (much), so you can guess what I’m doing at 3:00 a.m. It’s probably why I have a disproportionate number of followers from the Europe.
Hi DR, Thanks for stopping by and adding your input. It is very frustrating to have so many followers most of whom do not connect. All the trouble we go to to tweet and find good content to tweet and then nothing! Some of my followers retweet my tweets and some reply, but few seem to come to my blog and add enter the conversation. Glad you could relate to my rant! So, what are you going to do? Keep tweeting so much or cut back?