ACFW Virtual Conference Day 1, Writing for Twitter

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Day 1

Writing tweets

Brevity is king on Twitter.  You’ve only got 140 characters and spaces to get your whole message out.

(I know. Don’t panic.)

140 characters isn’t much, but it’s plenty if you understand that “Great Tweeters do not live by one tweet alone.” (Bad paraphrase, I know.)  But if you are going to be on Twitter to do more than converse every-so-often–in other words, if you want to actually make sales on Twitter, then you need TWEETS—plural.  Not one or two, but hundreds.  (Don’t panic.  It’s easy to accomplish this.)

Today we’re going to learn to write “sell” tweets FAST.

First, you need to get the link you want to use and shrink it.

Most links look like this:  http://www.amazon.com/Deep-in-the-Heart-ebook/dp/B005LVVIIG/ref=sr_1_5_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1372970734&sr=8-5&keywords=staci+stallings

You don’t want that or even this:  http://www.amazon.com/Deep-in-the-Heart-ebook/dp/B005LVVIIG

Those eat up too many of your precious 140 characters.

You can shorten links at Hootsuite.com or at bitly.com or any other shortening service.

You want a link that looks roughly this long:  http://ow.ly/mFEzI

Once you have your shortened link, create a document (in Word or Notebook) called “Tweets.” Paste the link at the top of your page with a designation of what it is.  For example:

DEEP IN THE HEART http://ow.ly/mFEzI

Then, write your tweets for that book underneath.

If you have more than one book, you can put the next book underneath so you can easily grab tweets about each book once they are written.

For each tweet you want to have:

Hook

Info/TITLE

Link

Hashtags

The Hook

The hook is a super-short attention getter.  You can use several things for your hook including snippets from your book description or reviews.

I often grab a review and start chopping like this:

“Deep in the Heart is a book about forgiveness and hope, but it leads the reader through tons of twists and turns.  It truly is a gem in the genre!  I highly recommend it.”

Hooks:

“A book about forgiveness and hope…”

“Tons of twists and turns…”

“A gem in the genre!”

“I highly recommend it.”

Once you get say 5-10 hooks, then you want to include info, which is usually the title of your book, coupled with your link.  I put my titles in ALL CAPS, so the reader locks into that info and also so I can tell what a tweet is about quickly without reading the whole thing.

Putting those three pieces together, you get:

“A book about forgiveness and hope…” DEEP IN THE HEART http://ow.ly/mFEzI

All you need now is to add some hashtags, which we will talk about next time!  Stay tuned…