Buffy Andrews’ tips for promoting books

Neighbors who ask Buffy Andrews for a cup of sugar probably get a full canister.

I emailed several authors, asking their advice on book promotion for the post I published yesterday. Some didn’t respond, which was fine. I knew they were busy. Some responded with a single tip or a few, which I was hoping for, and I gladly included them in the post. Buffy responded in less than an hour “off the top of my head” with a detailed promotion strategy. So I’m using her tips as a separate guest post (yesterday’s post was pretty long already), with a few of my observations sprinkled in and at the end. So here’s Buffy:

I market my books just as I market anything else. You want to fish where the fish swim. So, identify your audience, figure out who would be most interested in your book, then go fishing.

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Use lists, TweetDeck, HootSuite, saved searches, alerts to organize Twitter’s chaos

I love the variety and serendipity of Twitter’s timeline. Whenever I check my timeline, I see the news, commentary, humor and complaints of the moment from the nearly 2,500 people that I follow.

But the variety and serendipity that I love can quickly become the chaos that makes Twitter confusing and time-consuming — and thus useless — to a busy beat reporter.

Reporters, even if they enjoy the free flow of the timeline, should use Twitter lists, saved searches, alerts and/or columns in a service such as TweetDeck or HootSuite so they can more efficiently and more reliably find the tweets that are most useful to them.

One more important way to organize Twitter is to check your “mentions” regularly. On Twitter.com, click “connect” at the top of the page, and it will let you see only tweets that mention you (or you can click the tab to see all your interactions – retweets, new followers and people who have favorited your tweets, in addition to mentions). This helps you see quickly when people are replying to your tweets or otherwise mentioning you.

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Advice for building engagement through newsroom Twitter accounts

Like many institutional Twitter accounts, Journal Register Co. newsroom accounts need to be more engaging and conversational.

We tweet a lot of links to our content. But we’re not very personable. In the coming months, I will be working with JRC colleagues to strengthen engagement on newsroom Twitter accounts. I’ll start by sharing some best practices here. I’ll blog later about using Facebook. I’ve already shared some advice for individual journalists using Twitter. Today I focus on branded newsroom accounts (whether that’s the lead newsroom account or a niche account focusing on a topic such as sports or a beat).

The specific practices start with some guiding principles in use of social media: Use good sense. Practice good journalism. Be creative, aggressive, accurate and ethical.

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Updated Twitter time management tips

I first posted Twitter time management tips in February 2010. I updated them Sept. 4, 2012 as part of my #twutorial series. 

As I visit newsrooms and since I started my #twutorial series of Twitter advice for journalists, people often ask how they squeeze Twitter into their busy days.

At one level, the answer is simple: You make time for what’s important. In my last post I noted why Twitter is valuable for journalists. If something is valuable, you prioritize and figure out how to fit it into your workday.

But I also understand the question and the challenge. Twitter can easily suck up big chunks — or lots of little chunks — of your day. And busy journalists face so many demands in shrunken newsrooms that we have to manage time carefully even with the tools that are valuable.

The tips specific to Twitter are coming shortly. But first a caveat: You need to invest some time learning to use Twitter, especially mastering advanced search and connecting with people in your community. I’m not going to pretend you don’t need to spend some time to learn and to develop a helpful network.

Learning and connecting take some time, but keep in mind that Twitter also saves you time. I’ve already noted how Twitter helps you connect with sources quickly in breaking news stories. You also can use Twitter (once you’ve developed a large, engaged following) to save time in other ways, getting quick answers to questions and finding sources for routine stories. (I’ll do a separate #twutorial post sometime on crowdsourcing.)

Now for the tips on Twitter time management:

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Trying out Twitter for fun and business

I’ll be teaching Getting Started with Twitter this Tuesday and Thursday at Kirkwood Community College. This post is designed to supplement the course. It is an updated, adapted version of earlier tip sheets I have done, most recently the Getting started in Twitter tips I provided in August for my Using Social Media for Business class. Those tips, of course, focused on business uses for Twitter. These will include business and personal uses.

Twitter is a useful and fun communication tool for a variety of business and personal uses: 

• You can follow activities and discussions of people in the community, staying current on issues and events.
• You can connect with colleagues and share ideas with them.
• You can follow the news.

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