This past week, I went viral on Twitter for the first time. Okay, “viral” may be a strong word for it, but 3600 engagements v my usual 25-ish was a pretty big day for me. I’m now up about 500 followers from this time last week, and it all started with TweetDeck.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, TweetDeck is a Twitter management interface I started using a while back to schedule tweets for #PitMad and other Twitter pitch contests. In addition to scheduling tweets, it has the ability to show multiple timeline streams side-by-side, along with notifications, messages, searches, etc. You can customize what you’re seeing in each feed, rearrange them however you want, etc.
As I mentioned in part 1 of this series, I get serious overwhelm from Twitter, so I’ve been using TweetDeck on my laptop for a while to help me parse my feed. Since you can set columns up to display a list you’ve set up, I had one showing favorite authors like Neil Gaiman and Jessie Mihalik, another showing tweets from literary agents I follow, and a third that was just my regular newsfeed.
On Monday, I was feeling a little frustrated because I’d asked a question that got several responses, but they were from self-publishing authors so their answers weren’t particularly useful to me, as I’m pursuing traditional publishing. They are both valid paths that different people take for different reasons, but they are very much not the same. I decided to build a list of authors on the traditional publishing journey to follow and use as a starting point for future questions.
Thus, my viral-ish tweet was born.
And boy howdy did I build a list! As of right now more that 350 people are on it and 60 people are following it. I continue to add people who mention querying or agents in their tweets or bio, so it will continue to grow.
Now, because I have this awesome list set up, I was able to add it to my TweetDeck feeds, and it makes Twitter so much better for me. I still occasionally go to Twitter on my phone’s app, but since I use Twitter mostly for the business of writing, I was never big on scrolling through Twitter anyway.
So if you’re overwhelmed and would like a way to focus your feeds, I highly recommend the TweetDeck/lists combo.
Happy tweeting, and happy writing!
Esmari Writes 