Thursdays with Amanda: The Importance of Networking on Twitter

Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. You can also check out her marketing skills on Fiverr. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

I barely have any Twitter followers!

No one tweets me! Heck, no one even retweets me!

My Tweets fall on deaf ears!

Have you ever wondered why Twitter isn’t working? Have you ever stared blankly at your Twitter home page in a painful attempt to write something that is reTweetable? Favorite-able? Enjoyable? And then have you whittled your overly long message down to 140 characters (link included!) and sent it out to the masses only to go…unnoticed?

If this fits you, know that you’re not alone! Many struggle with Twitter, and it’s understandable. We treat it like we treat Facebook. We throw something out there and wait for the interactions to roll in.

But Twitter isn’t like Facebook. With Twitter, you have to be far more relational.

It’s a scary thing to promise marketing results, because let’s face it…marketing is a gamble each and every time. So I was a bit hesitant when I set up my Fiverr account. I felt fairly confident that I could (and can) provide social media copy that gets results, but I had doubts. I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to go back to my clients and tell them that I don’t know how to help them. That I’ve done my best and my best isn’t working.

But eventually, I put my fears aside, created my page, and told a few people about my account.

The general idea behind the services that I offer on Fiverr is to help people understand how they can better communicate via social media. Yes, I write copy for them, and yes, I do research and handle a lot of the legwork. But my goal is to also show them how they can improve.

My first Fiverr job was to write five Tweets for an author that I knew. The goal? To help the author gain followers. After a bit of panic and sudden onslaught of self-doubt, I put my head down and worked.

I reminded myself that to gain followers, the author had to IDENTIFY A TARGET AUDIENCE. For this author, a clear target audience was “geeky pastors.” Once I had that nailed down, I knew that the next step would be to FIND THE TARGET AUDIENCE ON TWITTER. With the help of Google and Twitter’s search engine, I found 4-5 individuals that fit the bill. Which only meant that I needed to WRITE COPY THAT WOULD ENGAGE THOSE USERS.

I whipped together a few Tweets, sent them to the client with a note as to how to use them, and the next thing I knew, the author was showing me screen shots of this crazy long Twitter conversation he was having with these five Geeky Pastors.

If he keeps it up, he’s going to get some new followers. He’s going to have direct contact with potential readers. And it’s going to make his job of marketing his books a whole lot easer. Plus, imagine what will happen if he keeps finding NEW geeky pastors?! The sky is the limit here, but it all starts with being proactive.

The worst thing you can do on Twitter is sit back and wait for followers. The best thing you can do is find those who fit your audience and engage them in conversation.

I don’t mean for this to be an advertisement for my Fiverr page, but if you’re curious to see what $5 can get you, check it out. I also plan to add a few more gigs, one being where I will research Twitter users for you and find some that fit within your target audience.

Until next week!