Twitter Tools

Using Twitter Effectively (Part 4): Basic Tweet Adder Queries

September 20, 2011 Michael Hicks Blog, 2

In this installment, we’re going to zoom in a bit more on the TweetAdder app I told you about in Part 3, focusing on query strategies and syntax (oooOOOooo!) for reaching out to tweeps who hopefully will want to reach back.

The search function you’ll probably use most is the Tweet Search. As the name implies, this will take the query terms you enter (more on that shortly) and search the Twitter stream for them on a continuous basis if you have automation on (which you should!). When it finds results that match the terms, it adds those users into the “To Follow” list, and TweetAdder will automatically follow those folks (again, as long as you have the automation turned on for that function). Following back, of course, will be up to them.

Now, before we get into more of the nitty gritty of these searches, let me say right up front that I’m not going to tell you exactly what I put into my searches.

Before you start calling me dirty names, let me say why: my intent here is to try and teach you how to sculpt a block of marble into something more than just a bunch of rock chips. I’ll show you how to smack the chisel with the hammer, but I want it to be your creative energy that shapes the marble. If I tell you exactly what I’m doing and a whole bunch of people do that exact same thing, then we’ll wind up annoying a lot of potential readers (or would-have-been potential readers!).

So: in your Twitter kit you’ll soon have a hammer, a chisel, some band-aids for when you smack your thumb, and the basic knowledge of how to use those tools. Then you can go out and practice making your very own Winged Victory of Samothrace. Or Spongebob Squarepants. Whatever turns you on.

Let’s take a quick look at the Tweet Search screen (click on the image for an enlarged view where you can actually see something). The first thing we need to do is set a parameter or two. The first is Language. In most (but not all) cases, you’re probably going to want to focus on whatever your native language is, which I sort of/kinda assume is drawn from whatever people put in their Twitter profiles, but I’m not sure. I usually just keep mine on English, because that’s supposedly my native language, no matter what my mom says, and that’s the only language in which my books are currently available.

The next is Recency. This helps you limit the search to tweets that occurred in certain number of days, as determined by the dropdown menu. To be honest, I only limit the recency when I’m experimenting with a query and before I load it into the Automated Searches list, just to help it run faster. Once I’ve pinned down what I want, though, I change the recency to “Any” (searches Twitter for however long) and add it to the Automated Searches list. It may take the query a while to run the first time, but after that it generally runs pretty fast, because it will automatically dedupe the tweeps you’re already following.

I normally don’t use the location option, but you could. The only one that I know of that works is zip codes. Again, however, I’ll have to claim ignorance on this one because I haven’t found it very useful for myself personally. And, as you know, it’s all about me, right?

Now to the good stuff: QUERY SYNTAX! That’s a fancy term for words you use to help find tweeps you’d like to follow, and who hopefully will want to follow you back.

The first thing to understand is that there are two general types of query terms: ones that you want, and ones that you don’t want (which I’ll call “defeats”). You can search on just about anything in the content of a tweet, including a single word or part of a word, a set of words, a hashtag (one of those terms preceded by a # sign, like “#kindle”), etc.

Let’s say you run a search for kindle. That will bring back any tweet that has the string of letters “kindle” in it. Most of them, of course, are about Amazon’s Kindle, but you could get anything. If you searched for “man,” you’d get “man,” “woman,” “human,” “humane,” etc.

So, go ahead and stick in “kindle” as a term and hit the Search Now button to see what results you get.

Note: When I originally started with Tweet Adder, you could get up to 1500 hits returned for your search, but Twitter has since put a limit on such searches by adder-like apps and cut this down to 20. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means that your automated searches, which we’ll get into later, will run more frequently.

Now, looking at the results, there are clearly some promising tweets by people talking about loving to read on their Kindles, Kindle vs. Nook, etc., along with a lot of junk. Most of the “junk” are tweets that contain URLs. Why are those junk? Because most of them are going to be posted by authors like you! While linking up with other authors is fine, they’re not you’re primary audience. So we use a defeat, typing our query in like so: kindle -http (note that there’s a space between the two).

The results for this search look much better! Most of those obnoxious author types have been zapped, MWUAHAHAHA! But scrolling through the results, this actually looks like a pretty good search in and of itself.

One thing that I like to do to check the results is to click on the “Tweet” column, which will sort the tweets in order. Then I scroll down and look for any that have a bunch of duplicates: sometimes those are broadcasters, sometimes not. But if it’s something that looks like I don’t want it, like tweets from that dorky @kreelanwarrior guy (er, me!), I find a term in the tweet and add it to the query as a defeat, like this: kindle -http -kreelanwarrior (remember that defeating “kreelanwarrior” will also filter out “@kreelanwarrior”).

Okay, I told you I wasn’t going to give you any specific queries, but that’s one that you can fiddle with that – assuming you’re published on the Kindle (and you’d better be!) – you can use. Just don’t be obnoxious about it or I’ll send Cousin Vinnie to bust your kneecaps, ‘kay?

You can also search for terms like season of the harvest, but that you need to put in quotes: “season of the harvest”. If you don’t, it’ll just look for tweets that have all the individual words in them, which in some cases can yield rather entertaining results.

If you want it to find terms in an either/or fashion, you can do something like this using the OR operator: “michael r. hicks” OR “in her name”. That will pick up any tweet that has either michael r. hicks or in her name in it. Then you could put in one or more defeats: “michael r. hicks” OR “in her name” -”rv living is awesome”.

Once you’ve tweaked your search to how you like it, make sure to click on the Add Automated Search button, which will put it into the queue that will run continuously when you have the Automation On button clicked. You can add as many searches as you like, and I encourage you to continuously experiment.

And on a side note, if you click on the “Followers” tab on the left of the main interface (which will bring up a list of the people – surprise! – who are your followers) and look at the Source column, you can see how many followers you have from your searches. This gives you a good indication of how much of a return on investment you’re getting from each one in terms of the number of followers you’re getting.

Again, I want to emphasize that TweetAdder is one of the very few things that I decided to spend money on for promotional purposes, and it was an investment that’s paid for itself many times over. But like all powerful tools, you have to take the time to learn to use it effectively. Hopefully this post will help.

Book Promotion, Tweet Adder, Twitter, Twitter Tools

Using Twitter Effectively (Part 3): The Magic of Tweet Adder

September 13, 2011 Michael Hicks Blog, 9

Okay, now we come to what’s probably the single most important bit of technology that can help you use Twitter as effectively as possible in terms of reaching readers: it’s a program called Tweet Adder.

Note: While I’m gearing these articles to self-published authors, all this information on Twitter can be applied to any endeavor, and Tweet Adder has been at the heart of it for me. Not to put too fine a point on it, had it not been for Tweet Adder, you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now.

While I’ll discuss my abhorrence of spending money for promotional gimmicks in a later post, Tweet Adder is a glaring exception to the rule. At $55 for a single profile (Twitter ID) license, it’s an absolute steal for what it allows you to do. I’ll say this loud and clear so there’s no misunderstanding: if you get Tweet Adder and learn how to use it effectively, you will kick Twitter butt. If you don’t use it, or learn how to use it properly (and it does take a bit of time), you’re walking right past a potential gold mine.

Now, I’m not going to go into a bunch of buttonology here on exactly how to use the app, because the Tweet Adder folks have a pile of tutorials to step you through all that (although I plan to put together some video tutorials on using it from an author’s perspective). But let me give you a brief rundown on the features that I like most, then in later posts we’ll look at some of them in more detail.

1. It helps you automate the process of finding followers who might be interested in your book

“Hey,” you say, “isn’t that cheating? Shouldn’t I be slaving over my Twitter account, adding people one by one?”

Listen, my love, the Earth is round, not flat. You need to spend as much of your time as you can writing, and if you can find technology to help you make better use of your time, you’re a dingbat for not using it. Where you get personal is in your interaction on a daily basis with the folks you follow/who follow you.

How does it follow people? There are several ways. One of the biggies is that you can set up automated searches for key terms inside tweets. Let’s say your genre is romance. You could set up a recurring, automated search that looks for things like “romance novel” or “romance story” (or, heck, take the plunge and look for “bodice ripper”!) that appear in tweets out there in the Twitterverse that your potential readers might use.

You’re going to have to do some research and tweaking to find out what those terms are, but let’s assume right now that you have a general idea. Tweet Adder can automatically add those folks to your “to follow” list and will automatically follow them.

You can also add in what are called defeats to your queries to help weed out junk. For example, when I run most of my searches, I usually put in -http, which eliminates any tweets that have hyperlinks in them, and -”social media” (note: the quotes make Tweet Adder look for that exact phrase, otherwise it would look just for those two words in any order in a tweet) to weed out the self-proclaimed social media gurus.

Or try searching for terms in profiles, by location (zip code is typical), by the followers of another Twitter user (let’s say you want to reach out to all of Jim Cameron’s followers – you can do that), people who are followed by a given user, and also by terms found in open (publicly accessible) twitter lists that are part of the list name.

You can use combinations of those different searches to keep your “to follow” list full, and Tweet Adder will just chug right along, following people. If you do things right, many, if not most, of those people follow you back. For those who don’t…

2. It will automatically unfollow people who don’t follow you back

While you’ll still need to periodically prune your follower/following lists manually (Tweet Adder doesn’t catch everything), this feature is great because you can tell Tweet Adder to unfollow anyone who hasn’t responded to your follow request.

You can set several options for this, the most important of which is the number of days to give them before you unfollow. The default is three days, which is pretty good. I wouldn’t set it lower than two, and probably no higher than five – let’s face it, if someone’s a regular Twitter user and they haven’t responded in five days, they’re not gonna follow you back.

And remember, unfollowing people who aren’t reciprocating is very important once you hit the two-thousand mark for people you’re following, when Twitter imposes the 1.2 to 1 ratio that I mentioned in an earlier post.

Tweet Adder will also let you add users to a “white list” who are exempt from being unfollowed. So in case you want to follow celebrities or whatever, just for your own entertainment, Tweet Adder won’t zap them from your follow list.

3. You can automatically post tweets

This is one of Tweet Adder’s most powerful features, but also one that is very easily abused. You can add a bunch of tweets (pretty much as many as you want, either manually one by one, or imported from a text file) to the automatic tweet list, and then tell Tweet Adder how often you want them to go out; you can also set some other variables. I use this for sending out my promo tweets, and based on my experience, I have a few recommendations:

1. Don’t send out promo tweets more often than about once an hour. I have my settings at 65 to 90 minute intervals. That tends to let them blend into the timelines of your tweeps and generally isn’t too overwhelming or annoying. Otherwise you’ll be rightly accused of spamming and people will unfollow you.
2. Mix in some “useful” tweets with your promos. For example, I send out links to the various free ebook reader apps out there, so people who don’t own a Kindle or Nook, etc., can still take advantage of my ebooks if they want. You can also mix in some quotes or other inspirational things – whatever trips your trigger.
3. I’ll cover this in more depth in a later post, but don’t scream “BUY MY BOOK!!!” Nobody responds to that except maybe by hitting the unfollow button. Don’t try to sell – try to inform. Tell them something interesting about your book. The only thing that you should consider putting in all caps is the title. I do that when I mention the title, or maybe to highlight a word (usually when I’m being a smartass), but that’s it. Some people don’t like that, but I’ve gotten maybe two actual complaints about it in the course of thousands of tweets exchanged with thousands of tweeps.
4. Make sure to add tweets for any book reviews you’ve gotten from bloggers, the press, etc. Again, though, inform, don’t push. “My thriller SEASON OF THE HARVEST just got a great review – check it out at http://ow.ly/50A6O“, for example.

4. Automatically tweet your blog posts via RSS

This is a really handy feature that gets around a lot of the shenanigans involved in getting your blog posts fed to Twitter: Tweet Adder will just pop out the title and a link from your site’s RSS feed when you make a post. Done. You can even add multiple RSS feeds if you like.

5. Send out an automatic “thank you” DM

If you don’t know, a “DM” is a direct message that only you and the intended recipient sees; it doesn’t appear for anybody else. Even thought it’s automated, this is a VERY important aspect of Tweet Adder if you take advantage of it properly.

If you haven’t already, you want to prepare some sort of content that you can give away free to your readers. If you only have one book out, you could offer them the first few chapters in ebook format(s) or a character study, or maybe link them to a YouTube video or an audio podcast thanking them for joining (Hmm. That’s the first time I’d thought of that! Might have to try it!). Just give them *something* to make them feel welcome and give them a warm fuzzy. In my case, since I’ve got several books out in the IN HER NAME series, I give folks a free copy of the complete novel of IN HER NAME: EMPIRE to whet their appetites.

This lets you do it without having to do it by hand – save yourself time. Somebody follows you, Tweet Adder sends them a welcome DM message, which of course should contain a link to your welcome freebie.

“But there are people out there who hate automated DMs!” Yes, there are. There are also people out there who hate poodles, hamsters, and chocolate cake. You can’t please everybody all the time, but using this you can please a lot of people by giving something worthwhile as a thank-you for following you.

6. Send out “broadcast” DMs

I’ll admit that I haven’t actually used this feature yet, but now that I’m going through Tweet Adder’s functions in more detail, I see that I may have to start. This feature allows you to send DMs to all your followers, sort of like a broadcast. But rather than having the information potentially lost in their timeline, it’ll appear in the DM inbox, which is generally not nearly as full of junk.

Beware, however, that this is another feature that could easily be mis-used by loading it up with a bunch of spam. Don’t do dat.

However, if you just put a book on sale and want to let people know, or you’re starting a promo contest or some other event, this might be a good tool to reach out to folks on an occasional basis. Again, however, be very judicious, save this for special occasions, and DO NOT overdo it!

In Conclusion…

There are some other features that are worth exploring, but the above are the main ones that I’ve found useful. But the bottom line is that if you’re not using Tweet Adder, you’re not getting anywhere near the potential traction with Twitter that you could be. And, as Yoda might say, “Powwwerful traction it is!”

Book Promotion, Tweet Adder, Twitter, Twitter Tools