Booksellers Blog

Image credit: Sreejith K via Flickr

Everybody’s talking about Twitter. In the past month or so, I’ve seen several booksellers and publishing people sign on to twitter to try it out. And I think many are engaging with new people, learning a lot, and having fun.

Here’s the thing: once you follow more than 30 people, the “standard” way of using Twitter (by going to the twitter web page) just doesn’t work. But if you try to keep down the number of people you follow, you don’t get the most out of Twitter, especially if you are using it as a business to engage with your current or potential customers.

How I manage twitter (and don’t let it manage me)

I follow back anyone who a) is not a spammer and b) does not have a twitter stream full of self-promotional tweets. If the first page or two of their twitter stream has something that shows they are human and somewhat interesting, I will follow them back. Since I don’t know if the follower is someone who works at a bookstore, or a reader or listener of Books on the Nightstand, I don’t want to alienate anyone that I might actually want to get to know.

The way I manage it: Tweetdeck. It’s a program that you download and install on your computer. So far it’s the best tool for twitter that I have found.

Put your friends in columns

The key in using Tweetdeck is to set up columns to group your followers. Above is a screenshot of my setup. I have a column for BookPeople, one for Book Bloggers, one for Social Media, and another for Friends. That column all the way over to the left — that’s everybody. I almost never look over there. If I end up talking with someone that I follow, I typically move them into one of those groups.

I try to make a point of dipping into my “all following” column once a week or so to see if there’s someone I want to move to a group, and to see if there’s anything interesting going on. But unless someone from that column replies to me or retweets one of my posts, I don’t typically take notice of them on a day-t0-day basis.

It’s on all day

I run Tweetdeck on my home computer, and leave it on all day. It pulls in the tweets and keeps them, so at any time, I can check in and quickly scroll through messages that came in while I was doing other things. Again, I usually keep this to just one or two columns, so it takes just a minute or two, and I don’t miss anything.
Remember, though, that Twitter is not like email. There is no expectation that you are looking at every tweet. If someone wants to reach you about something important, they will send you an @reply or direct message (and I suggest having your DMs forwarded to your email — you can do this in twitter settings).

Other powerful things that Tweetdeck can do

There are some other features of Tweetdeck that I couldn’t live without:

• Retweet with the click of the mouse
• Built-in URL shortener, to save characters when you are tweeting a link
• Email a tweet you like to yourself or someone else
• Follow, unfollow, add or remove to groups easily from within Tweetdeck
• Favorite tweets you want to read later. You can then create another column for Favorites and read at your leisure
• Create a column for a search term and it will automatically put any tweets with that term in the column
• Follow conferences or conversations that use a hashtag (#) by using a search column

But really, 20 minutes a day?

There are, of course, exceptions to the 20 minutes a day. If I’m in a conversation with someone on twitter, I’ll likely stick around until its natural end. I have also started to use Twitter as my morning news source with my cup of coffee. Many of the people I’m following tweet interesting links and breaking news (follow @jafurtado for publishing news). I find twitter to be fun, so occasionally I will spend 1/2 hour or so in the early morning or in the evening talking with people about publishing or book blogging or whatever.  But on an average day, when I’m busy with work or calling on bookstores, I spend no more than 20-30 minutes on twitter, broken into 5-10 minute increments.

There are a few other twitter “power tools” that I’ll write about in future posts, but really, this is the biggie.

I hope this is helpful. If you have any twitter tricks or tips to share, please let us know in the comments. And if you have questions, ask them there, too; I’m sure others have the same questions.