Twitter You're Fired! Or Are You?

Twitter You’re Fired! Or Are You?

This was posted in an Author’s Group I belong to by a member who has not had the best of relationships with Twitter, I admit. But as we struggle to use our time wisely to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, to Edify believers, to promote a Christian Worldview, and to teach and to delight, we have to look at all the evidence when we consider promotion. So consider this testimonial by Steve Biddison, author of seven books on coaching and Christian fantasy.

Twitter, I called this meeting to let you know my intention to fire you. You’ve worked for me over a year now, but quite frankly, I feel as though I have been working for you. I’ve put in countless hours with you and have seen no return on my time investment. In fact you demand that you monopolize my time. But for what? Oh you’ve made great promises over the year. “start using hashtags” you tell me. So I did. But no one could see my tweets because they weren’t top tweets. So you insist I work harder to get more tweets. And again I listen and after a couple of thousand tweets, I arrive at top tweet status on almost all my hashtags, including ones like #amazon and #kindle, not to mention any number of smaller tags. But still you bring me no profit. “but wait,” you tell me. “labor Day we

ekend will be great. Tweet a bunch then.”. So I do. 350 tweets to be exact, tweeting around the clock since Friday morning. Not one sale through the whole labor day weekend So I ask why you insisted I waist all those hours scheduling tweets? But then came the real shocker for me. Late Monday afternoon I published a new book. A basketball playbook for goodness sake. I didn’t even let you know about because I was afraid you would insist on tweeting about it. So I did no advertising and lo and behold, I wake up this morning to find one had already sold WITHOUT you tweeting about it. So now I ask you, dear Twitter, what do you have to say for yourself? Give me some reasons why I should not fire you today.

http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Biddison/e/B006WM9GOG/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1346773376&sr=1-2-ent

3 Responses to Twitter You’re Fired! Or Are You?

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elkjerkyforthesoul

September 4, 2012 at 2:51 pm

I’m a little concerned about the tone of your comments, Matt. Steve didn’t ask to be on the blog with this post. I asked him. He’s sharing an experience, a frustration. He’s also making a personal and professional decision for himself, not for anyone else. He hasn’t attacked you, but you seem to be angry with him. I don’t quite understand why. Concerning the stories, the covers, the quality of the workmanship of the books Steve has produced, I haven’t read them all, but I believe those factors are in good shape. All of us struggle for ways to get our message out. If, for Steve, Twitter isn’t the way, I pray he finds the one that is.

Matt Patterson

September 4, 2012 at 12:11 pm

It boils down to this: You want word to get out? Cross-promote with other authors who can spread the word of your work to their followers.

If you are not CONSISTENTLY promoting your work and building relationships on Twitter – you’ll walk away frustrated and empty-handed. Sure, it can be a smidge exhausting, but we, as self-published authors can’t expect to snap our fingers and have best-sellers overnight. Doing something for the sake of just doing it doesn’t bring results. You HAVE TO HAVE A PLAN. Tweeting a couple times a week or month – isn’t going to bring you new relationships or sales. I think there are enough of us here that can say Twitter does bring results. BUT IT TAKES TIME! If you’re not willing to put in a CONSISTENT plan and effort – I would look for another avenue to market your work. Twitter does work, but consistency and patience are needed. If you can’t be either one or both of those – I’d look elsewhere.

Ask yourself – How important is this to me? Without consistency, a true and real effort – of course you’re going to fail.

Also, I would’ve never promoted so heavily on Labor Day. Everyone is out by their pools and grilling burgers.

Again, it boils down to your product. Do you have a great cover, a great story, clean and free of errors? Then there’s effort. If one of these are missing – more often than not – all the tweets in the world won’t help it.

My advice. Find another way to market your work. This is not your first rant on this topic. If you don’t want to tweet, then by Sam Adams don’t tweet and be happy. Why do you want to convince the world that it doesn’t work because it didn’t work for YOU! There’s plenty of evidence that it does work.