Viral Issue: Creating Your Viral Loop on Twitter

There is a reason they call it viral marketing—because the best social media functions like a virus. It spreads easily, embeds itself seamlessly into hosts and exploits a few critical individuals to achieve global exposure. It may sound terrifying, but you can control it. And if you do, you can reach thousands of people—and thousands of the exact people you want to reach.

Right now, the place to start is Twitter. The explosive microblogging platform is a channel, an accelerant and a social barometer all rolled into one. Its basic method is simple: users sign up at Twitter.com, submit messages no longer than 140 characters through a mobile phone or Internet browser, which are published instantly to the public. These messages, or tweets, appear to anyone following a user’s feed. Already, we see Twitter’s influence everywhere, from the first photo of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 floating in the Hudson River to the Iranian protests on the other side of the world. And Twitter continues to grow at a staggering rate, on track to achieve 18 million users by the end of the year.

What does all this mean for paper-and-ink booksellers? Plenty, because Twitter’s power lies in its ability to collapse news cycles to real-time and break down traditional media barriers. To the publishing industry, this introduces an unprecedented opportunity to engage readers and integrate reading real books into our increasingly digital lifestyles.

The industry is taking notice—and some are already reaping the benefits. To market Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, Doubleday started a Twitter account and posted short puzzles in the form of “cryptic tweets” that engaged more than 4,500 followers and built up momentum to the book’s September 15 launch. Booksellers have also joined the game. Borders revealed hourly clues to secret book giveaway locations and BNBuzz, one of Barnes & Noble’s nine Twitter accounts, uploaded photos of Dan Brown at his launch party and, naturally, announced record-breaking book sales on Tuesday.

Wine evangelist Gary Vaynerchuck has rallied a community around his book Crush It, launching a Twitter account and a “hashtag”—a Twitter label that connects supporters to one another. New media guru Jeff Jarvis peppers his daily dialogue on Twitter with sightings and “retweets,” or repeated tweets, on his book What Would Google Do? That book just entered its 10th printing. In England, David Eagleman watched sales for the book Sum skyrocket to a lofty #2 position on Amazon after actor Stephen Fry tweeted his cheeky endorsement to some 750,000 followers.

Like everything in life, there is a certain etiquette to using Twitter, and gaining influence takes time. Here’s a crash course on getting the most out of it.

1. Choose a Twitter name that’s searchable. It should be a literal representation of your digital brand, whether it’s your name or your company. This helps friends find you, and strangers define you. Prefacing a word with '@’ indicates a username and links it to a Twitter profile. For example, mine is @RachelSterne.

2. Add an avatar that represents you. Human beings naturally look for faces in social interactions, even if these faces might be logos or designs. Without an image, your feed will feel hollow. Add a link and description.

3. Pick your beat, and stick to it. Become an expert and add value by tweeting tightly focused industry news and insights—not mundane daily life. Check what your Twitter flock is interested in at TwitterSheep.com.

4. Pick your rhythm, and stick to it. Whether you’re prolific or concise, maintain your pace of tweeting so that followers don’t feel inundated or abandoned. Less is usually more.

5. Keep it positive. Studies have found that upbeat tweets are more likely to be retweeted, or repeated. Being positive also gives you a better brand identity.

6. Don’t cheat. Don’t mass-follow for reciprocation or use a paid service to gain followers. It’s obvious. The higher your ratio of followers to follows, the more credibility you establish: you are a leader.

7. Help people find you. Use hashtags, labels prefaced by '#’ that link your comment to an ongoing event or dialogues. Add yourself to a directory like @MrTweet.

8. Engage. Direct comments to others and use attribution with the @ symbol, a sort of virtual hat tip. Be controversial. Write in sound bites that resonate.

9. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Make your tweets smart and compact to encourage retweets, the currency of Twitter. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to avoid using up too many characters. When you package a great tweet, you’ve built your own viral loop.

Viral Issue: Creating Your Viral Loop on Twitter

More articles from PW's Viral Issue: