I have writing news! I also need your help, but first things first. I’m excited to tell you that the team at one of my favorite writing blogs, Writer Unboxed, asked me to write a monthly column about Twitter. And you know what? Writing a monthly column makes me a columnist! I couldn’t be more thrilled.
Writer Unboxed is a website that authors Therese Walsh and Kathleen Bolton started in 2006. Over the past six years the site has exploded to include columns and guest posts by best-selling authors, agents, and other experts in the business. I will be their Twitter “expert.” How perfect is that? I love Twitter, and I love to call myself an expert. It’s a match!
Photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa via Flickr
WHY TWITTER IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MILESTONE IN MY WRITING CAREER
First, let me reiterate: I DO consider this a major milestone in my writing career. About two years ago, before I started my this blog, before I had any short stories published, and before I published any essays anywhere, I entered a contest at Writer Unboxed with the hopes of winning a spot as their “aspiring writer columnist.” I was a quarter-finalist, which meant they would publish one of the posts I had submitted during the contest.
That piece, about how hard it was to publicly call myself a writer, appeared on Writer Unboxed in October 2010. I discovered that the “blogging voice” suited me well, and I started my blog one month later. (If you want to know why I decided to call this place “Nina Badzin’s Blog” instead of something clever or cute, I discuss those details here.)
Back to Writer Unboxed. I knew about their 2010 contest in the first place from Twitter. And through Twitter I’ve continued to learn about other writing opportunities and make connections with writers at all levels in the business. Now, exactly two years later, the founders of Writer Unboxed have invited me to write for them regularly. I consider this a win. Or as Charlie Sheen and his followers might have tweeted earlier this year, #winning.
Twitter is a language, a science, and an art. I think I can help writers or anybody interested in using Twitter put their best face forward there and do it efficiently as well. I can’t wait to get started. The column begins in mid-October.
HERE’S THE PART WHERE I NEED YOUR HELP! I would love if you could answer one or all of the questions below.
- What, if anything, confuses you about Twitter?
- What do you love about it?
- What do you NOT love about it?
- Are there any Twitter etiquette questions you’d like to see me address on Writer Unboxed, either because you want the answer, or because you want OTHER PEOPLE to see the answer? (For example, I wish more people would read my “rules” about getting the thank you tweets on Twitter under control.)
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR TWO CENTS.
And for those who celebrate the Jewish High Holy Days, I want to wish you a happy, healthy, and sweet new year. L’shana tova! May you be inscribed and sealed for a good one!
FINALLY, in completely unrelated news, I read two great books in the past few weeks that I’d love to discuss. In both cases I didn’t like the ending, HOWEVER, I can’t stop thinking about both books. They are: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. Perhaps I’ll pick one when it’s my turn to choose the book for the Great New Books online book club. (We are currently reading Hemingway’s Girl by Erika Robuck, which I will be reading this week.)
Nina (@NinaBadzin)
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Welcome! I am a freelance writer living in Minneapolis with my husband and four children. My essays on parenting, social media etiquette, improving my habits, Jewish life and more appear in the Huffington Post, Kveller.com, The Jewish Daily Forward and elsewhere. I'm glad you found your way here!
Hi Nina-
You are my Twitter Guru. My Budha. My Rock.
so- The thing that I find epicly frustrating about twitter is that if you have a huge announcement, or an awesome tweet you want the world to see…it is entirely possible it will be missed because if the audience isn’t online, they’ll miss it. I see Twitter as efficient as blinking an eye. You blink once and it gets the job done but then you blink one second later and the first blink was forgotten! thoughts?
Alexis, also mix up the times of day. You’ll reach different people at night, day, etc.
So glad to be someone’s rock.
Okay, you are right re: the blink of an eye. The “trick” to Twitter is developing an authentic following, which means that people really read, RT, and care about your tweets. An authentic following has nothing to do with numbers. Really it’s better to have 300 “real” followers than 1000 followers who never see your tweets. The question, of course, is how to develop such a following. Well, it takes time. It means RTing other people’s stuff, visiting their blogs, etc. I think you do a great job of that already. One challenge you will have is that you are a company, and people are sensitive about being “sold to.” But plenty of brands do well on Twitter. I really think time is the main thing.
As for getting a certain message out, it’s okay to repeat things on Twitter, but just don’t do it all day long. And mix it among tweeting other links and talking to people on Twitter.