W&N Fiction

To Tweet or Not To Tweet

Gollancz Author: - January 12th, 2012
News, Other, Social Networking

Social Media is a wonderful thing. At last! A way in which we can all talk directly to each other. At last! A way in which people can communicate quickly and easily to say they loved something, to ask questions, and to get all the latest news.

At last, as a friend pointed out to me, a way to tell the world what you had for lunch. And forget drunken-texting of ex-partners. Now the world is your oyster in 140 characters . . . and as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility.

. . . So here are a few of the greater pitfalls I have seen and cringed over, online, in the name of that dread responsibility . . .

1) drunken tweeting! There’s a good chance that in retrospect you don’t really want the world to know. If it’s still funny in the morning, then maybe it’s worth sharing. In the meantime, like texting ex-partners, perhaps twitter is something best done sober.

2) the ‘office test’. Are you about to tweet something that you would be happy to shout out – or at least say out loud – in the middle of your office? Is it something your colleagues would be interested in? . . . if you don’t think they will be very interested in your lunch, your followers probably won’t be either.

3) ‘if you can’t say something nice . . .’. Maybe this is just me, but we can choose what we share on twitter. So think twice. Why not tweet about that thing you loved, and share the joy with your friends and followers, rather than rag on someone or something which might be genuinely hurt by your comment?

4) personal account or professional account? This might be a trick question. To have followers, a feed needs to be more than soulless promotion, so even professional accounts needs to have some personality. To keep followers, a tweeter needs to be professional about it: there are many, many, many daily personal things that the world does not need to know about. So the key to both personal and business accounts is balance: have a sense of why you are on twitter (connecting with friends, self-promotion, representing your profession, for fun, to stealthily see what your employees are up to) and try to balance your Social Media presence accordingly. If 75% of your followers are your friends, constantly tweeting about your work is going to get boring. If 75% of your followers are strangers who are interested in your work, tweeting about your friends, or evening out isn’t really what they’re looking for. Your account is yours, of course, but be aware of your audience.

5) know the limitations. On twitter there are 140 characters available to you, without any aid from body language or tone of voice . . . so however we try, twitter is never going to be a place for informed debate. It’s much easier to have a fight than a discussion. It’s much more effective to link to a thoughtful blog piece or article than to try to convey it in tweets. So sharpen your wit, hone your one-liners, and get out your banter, all of which twitter loves. It’s not all about fluff . . . but maybe twitter is a place where you can stay informed, entertainingly.

6) and finally: be yourself. You’re the best thing your account has going for it, and friends and followers will see through you if you try to be something you’re not. They’ll like you for yourself. Have a bit of faith in that, and status-update as you are, not as you think you should be.

. . . and, as I’m the first to admit I’m far from a twitter expert (more like an interested utter-amateur) if you have top tips and hints to share about tweets and #tweetfail please comment on the blog, or tweet @Gollancz and share!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 3:58 pm and is filed under News, Other, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “To Tweet or Not To Tweet”

  1. Kit Berry says:
    January 12, 2012 at 4:55 pm

    I find Point #4 the really interesting one – both here and on FB. It’s so easy to get this bit wrong, not only on your own accounts but on others’ too. I once committed a dreadful faux pas with a Gollancz person on FB where the personal and professional lines had blurred too much for me – and rightly had my knuckles rapped. Mr B and I find the interplay between @GillianRedfearn and @Gollancz interesting – and have occasionally wondered about the dynamic here. Who is tweeting for @Gollancz? Or does it vary? Would you ever tell or is it a secret?

    I agree too about the difficulties in balancing work/life tweets and how this relates to why people follow you in the first place. It’s a mistake I think to try and be too clever and contrived – but no-one wants to sink into inanity either. You have to second-guess why people would be interested in anything you have to say and of course you’ll never really get it right. In my more cynical/stressed moments I really can’t be arsed with Twitter or FB as a professional tool – and then reality kicks in again and I submit once more to the Social Media yoke. Yesterday I tweeted about a fox who’d come into my garden just for a poo. Or was that on the blog?

    Thanks for a really interesting post, Gillian. And I believe the Society of Authors are soon to run an event on tweeting and blogging too which may be of interest to Gollancz authors.

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  2. Simon Simon says:
    January 12, 2012 at 5:33 pm

    Hi Kit!

    The dynamic on our tweet accounts is very simple. I tweet for @gollancz and Gillian tweets as @GillianRedfearn. It’s my job to try and cover all that we publish on the @gollancz twitter feed but it’s also invaluable to have the personal angle and particular passions that Gillian brings to the list represented, hence her own twitter feed and the frequent retweeting and cross-referencing that goes on between the two feeds. The secet being, I think, that we both enjoy tweeting too much not to be doing it. And it’s vital for the list to represent itself personally as well; hence our editor, Marcus, tweets as @marcusgipps and our digital publisher, Darren, as @thenashmeister. I tweet personally as @simonguy64 but I wouldn’t go there if I were you as it’s both odd and dull – a combination I’ve honed over many years :-)

    Enthusiasm is the key and that comes across best from tweeting with a personal feel.

    Reply
  3. Ross says:
    January 12, 2012 at 6:04 pm

    On point 4 Aside from looking after several work based Twitter accounts which fall pretty firmly on the professional side I also have a semi-personal one ghostlight_ross which falls somewhere in between. I think it’s partly due to sharing a lot of interests with many of my followers but I tend to find I get a pretty good response to both from people who are largely following me because of my job. Generally I think it helps put a more human face on things if you talk about what your doing outside of work.

    Obviously you can take it too far and you should be careful not to spam people with stuff they don’t care about but mixing it up can work fairly well.

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