One Great Tool To Make Twitter Even Better

by Traci Tyne Hilton @TraciTyneHilton

There are so many tools and programs available to people who market on the internet that I would go right over my word count trying to talk about them all. So I’m going to focus this time on bit.ly.

A productive marketing tweet says something interesting to your followers, has hash tags so that it spreads around the twitter-verse, and has an address in it. Your marketing tweet ought to look something like this: “Still cheaper than Starbucks coffee! Foreclosed and Eminent Domain Mitzy Neuhuas Mysteries http://t.co/pnE4HIn http://t.co/GDrrvSs #ian1” To make a tweet like that happen short web addresses are essential.

I use http://www.bit.ly as my address chopper. Bitly saves a list of the links I’ve created for me, which makes my life easier. Anyone with an ebook to market (or anything else for that matter) should have an easy place to pop over to where their links are saved. Keeping that info at Bitly means I have fewer locations to remember. One less thing to remember is good. 

Tweeting works best if you have content or good news to share and link shortening sites like Bitly help with that. They gather info on the folks who click you link and analyze it for you. Because of their analytics I’ve been able to track what counties are checking out my mystery series. 

So far the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Barbados, Germany, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Greece, France, Cyprus, Botswana, Philippines, New Zealand, and Sweden have checked it out. Neither of my book retailers report which specific countries have purchased the books, so I try to be very honest when reporting this info. I say something to the effect of “Sweden checked out Mitzy today!” At the end of each month I know how many ebooks have sold outside of the US, UK, and German markets but not to which counties exactly. But that’s okay, we are writers and we know how to show the analytics to their best effect.

Bitly is great, but there are other equally great options out there as well. Shorturl.com also offers the analytics that I like so much. Owl.ly offers the super sweet service of providing links to images and documents as well. If you don’t want a whole new account to manage, though I recommend you do, google.gl gives you one off short links. And Metamark.com is available as well, though I couldn’t find an example of their analytics. It appeared to be the URL shortener for people who prefer Lynix and other hard core computing.

Since it functions as a one stop location for the links you want to tweet and put in your status updates, offers you good news to share with potential readers, and does the essential shortening of links, I think finding the service you like the best is one of the first steps and ebook author should take.

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One Great Tool to Make #Twitter Even Better - @TraciTyneHilton (Click to Tweet)

Traci Tyne Hilton is the author of The Plain Jane Mysteries, The Mitzy Neuhaus Mysteries and the Tillgiven Romantic Mysteries. Traci has a degree in history from Portland State University and still lives in the rainiest part of the Pacific Northwest with her husband the mandolin playing funeral director, two busy kids, and their dogs, Dr. Watson and Archie Goodwin.

More of Traci’s work can be found at www.tracihilton.com