What is Twitter Etiquette?

As indie author's one of the most powerful tools for getting our name and product out there is social media. It's been a learning process over the past year, but we've finally got it down. I'm not sure about Von, but my favorite social media tool is Twitter. It's short and sweet, no need for extraneous content, 140 characters and you're done. If I happen to find an interesting article or picture, I just click on the blue bird, it's miniaturized to Shrinky Dink size and posted to our Twitter page, easy enough.

As our Twitter followers have grown over the past few months, so have our interactions, or Retweets. At first, we would send a Thank You tweet, thanking them for thinking of us, but we soon discovered that retweeting the retweeters content was even better to return the favor.  If an author happens to follow us then we make it a point to follow them back. It's a good way to grow your network and interact with other people trying to do the same thing you're doing.

I got quite a shock, one day while trying to thank one of our retweeters. I clicked on that author's name to find a profile page full of nudity, whips, chains, and handcuffs. Okay, if we're not comfortable even looking at this person's page, do we have to retweet their material because they retweeted ours?

Another question concerns serial retweeters. If we know they retweet our stuff almost automatically, sometimes several times a day, do we retweet their stuff multiple time also?

What about Followers who speak an entirely different language? Do I follow someone even though I don't have a clue what they're saying?

It's not like someone wrote a handbook on proper Twitter etiquette. I hate being rude and don't want our Followers to think we're trying to snub them. So we had to make up our own rules.
If a Follower is into something risque that we're not quite comfortable sharing on our page, we'll send a thank you Tweet or retweet something safe they've retweeted from someone else.

For the serial retweeters, we retweet them once or twice. Anything more and you're caught in a vicious, repeating loop.

The rest is just play it by ear and stick with our own judgment.  If we're not comfortable with something, than the best course of action is to leave it alone. Over time you'll gain Followers and you'll lose Followers, that's just the way Twitter goes.

It Ain't Easy

If you talk to anyone who blazed a new trail or started their own business, they'll tell you how hard they had to work to get it off the ground. They can tell you stories about the nights where they got little sleep or the ulcers they got while working to make their dream a reality.  Having your own business is certainly not for the lazy or the faint of heart. Doing your own thing is hard.

My writing buddy and I have been on this journey for over a year; starting working on our first novel June of 2012, since that time we've released two projects with a third being edited right now and the fourth currently being written with a script for Amazon Studios also in the works. Not too soon after we started our endeavor, we discovered that the writing is the easy part.

One can not simply put their book on Amazon and wish it to sell, you've gotta hustle. Along with our day jobs, we have to write, and find time in our schedules to tweet, network, and blog. There are never enough hours in the day and any time you spend with trivial things can be time better spent building our brand.

Like crumbs to a starving person, we get our little signs that we're headed in the right direction. Maybe while out in about we'll see the exact make, model, and color car one of our character drives or maybe we'll one across someone with the same name living in the same location that our characters are from. Or happen to be driving behind someone with a vanity plate that says 'Author'. We don't see these as coincidences, but as mile markers on our journey.

The challenges one faces while working their dreams are there to weed out the weak from the strong. Nobody ever said pursuing your dream would be easy; ask the people who've been through it.  If you keep your eyes on the prize than it will be yours. One day this will all pay off, until then we'll just keep blogging, networking, and tweeting.