#Writerslift: Engage or Promote?
My Experiment: Three days
First off, if you don’t know about #writerslift, it is a hashtag on Twitter that writers use to gain new followers or promote their writing (mostly books). On the good side, it does the above. On the bad side, it does the above.
I will admit to being one of those people who has acquired over 6K Twitter followers while following roughly the same number. There is a large crowd who will now go “Ugghh” and hurl virtual stones at me. Yet my early goal was to gain a significant number of followers. My current goal, because I admit to my errors, is to have a more interactive experience (engage) with like-minded writers, readers, and influencers.
So how did I get to 6K followers? Use of the #writerslift hashtag clearly gave me more new followers than any other method I tried. Of course, early on, I resorted to the tried and true beginning method: find fellow writers and follow them so they follow you back. Many find out a strange thing happens when you reach the 5K mark. Depending on the number of folks who follow you, Twitter may cap you at 5K. (Here’s a link to some rules about gaining followers on Twitter from the Twitter help center.)
I wasn’t capped at 5K. I had nearly as many followers as people I followed. Others who have been capped have resorted to unfollowing people they previously followed – another stoning infraction from the Twitter audience.
My experiment. I wanted to see what vigorous #writerslift participation would do for me. Over a 3-day period, I liked, retweeted, and replied to numerous #writerslift posts that other people tweeted. My reply was always a tweet with a link to purchase my latest book (that’s mostly how people reply to a #writerslift though you may see links to blogs and websites too). I was curious about three things:
- How many people would click on the link to my book?
- How many new followers would I get?
- How many people would purchase my book?
Basically, exposure, audience-building, and sales might describe these three items. (For the last item, I stopped all advertising a week before my test to ensure I wasn’t getting sales from some other effort.)
The results: The graph to the right is the number of folks that clicked on the link to my book. Phenomenal!!! Nearly a thousand clicks. Also, during this time, I gained hundreds of new followers. But the bottom line answer to “How many books would I sell?” Exactly ONE.
I’m a scientist in my day job, so I’m certain there are people out there ready to tell me how uncontrolled my experiment was. True. Maybe my book isn’t so good. Maybe the subject wasn’t enticing to the audience. Maybe people will buy it later. Maybe I sell zero books most of the time. Yes, it’s not the most careful experiment, but it was enlightening.
I do know from bitly and Twitter analytics that my 1st two results are fairly reliable (that a huge number of people clicked on the link and I gained hundreds of new followers). The latter is easy to see because in all my other engagement, besides randomly following many writers, I typically gain a few followers a day. I lose followers if I don’t remain active.
One note about the other participants in #writerslift tweets. They were much like me: writers selling their latest or bloggers promoting their site or something similar. I have nothing against them – I’m one of ’em. I don’t plan on going to the hashtag police and trying to stop people from using it in the future.
Where to go from here. From the standpoint of hawking your wares, Twitter, IMO, is not a great place to market a book. The exception is the announcement of a new book. That’s exciting and others are excited along with you. Twitter is far better for engagement of like-minded writers and your audience. I may continue throwing an occasional reply to a #writerslift, but I’ll spend much more time on finding useful content to tweet and interacting in a more intimate manner with writers, bloggers, influencers, and READERS!
A final caution: The above was a sample of ONE. Your mileage may vary.