Twitter: The Mortar in Your Social Media Wall (Part I)

You can understand Facebook and blogging. But what about Twitter? What can you do with 140 characters?

Truthfully, you can't do much in 140 characters, if you view it as a single tool that doesn't connect with other tools. Using Twitter on its own is like trying to build a wall out of mortar. You might be able to build a wall, but it's not going to be very high or very stable. Most likely, you're going to wind up with a big gray mound that isn't worth very much.

Mortar is used most effectively with bricks, to knit the bricks together to form a wall. That's how you should use Twitter. Consider your website, your Facebook profile and page, and your blog as the bricks. Twitter will help them stand together is a single useful unit.

Let's say you've got a book tour. You're appearing at three or four local book stores and you're guest writing on three or four different blogs. If you have a group of followers built up (more on that another time), you can post your appearance on your website, then Tweet (create a Twitter post) that links to your website. In your 140 characters, you might say "Shane Black battles his past and the Tampa mafia. Booksigning tonight @ B&N, North Dale Mabry, Tampa." That leaves you 40 characters for your URL. (We'll talk about how to shorten your URL in a subsequent post.

Another use for Twitter is to highlight your blog posts. For instance, when I posted the most recent Google settlement post, I posted "Google to give 63% of revenue to authors who opt in. Good overview of the proposed Google Books settlement..." followed by the URL.

Again, Twitter is best use as a complement with other components. More on how to use Twitter in upcoming posts.