Serafinn - Tweep-e-licious : 158 Twitter tips & strategies for writers, social entrepreneurs & changemakers who want to market their business ethically

Tweep-e-licious!

158 Twitter Tips & Strategies
for Writers, Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers
Who Want to Market Their Business Ethically

(thats exactly 140 characters!)

By Lynn Serafinn

Author of
The 7 Graces of Marketing
award-winning international #1 bestseller
in marketing, business ethics & social issues

Thank YOU for buying this book!
To show my appreciation, I have some gifts for you:
1. A 90-minute MP3 from my Tweep-e-licious! audio class
2. A 60-minute MP3 Twitter Q&A session AND
3. A Twitter Resource Pack filled with clickable links and commentary on over 100 useful Twitter resources.
To find out how to claim your gifts, go to at the end of this book..

Contents

Introduction:
The Little Tweet That Roared

Back in the summer of 2009, I met an author on Twitter named @TonyEldridge. Tony, who ran a blog called Marketing Tips for Authors, asked me to write an article sharing some of the marketing strategies I had used to propel my first self-published book The Garden of the Soul to become a top-20 spirituality bestseller on Amazon. To be perfectly honest, when Tony first asked me to do this, I felt more than a bit miffed. Hmmph! I thought. Here Ive spent two years pouring my heart and soul into a book and all people want to know is how I marketed it? They dont care about my book; they just want to sell their OWN books. Some bloody nerve! While I didnt voice these thoughts to Tony at the time (I did tell him later, and we both had a good laugh), I continued to grumble and complain to myself for two days, wondering what I could possibly gain from writing such an article. But my annoyance would soon prove ironic, for Tonys offer was about to open the door to something spectacular that would change my life forever.

I stopped playing prima donna and decided that writing for Tonys blog would be a good idea. Being resentful and miserly about sharing my marketing tips had only left me feeling cynical and disconnected; making the choice to be open and generous just felt better. Besides, Id be mentioning my book in the article even if I wasnt talking directly about it. It could be good publicity. So I got over my hissy fit, dusted myself off and wrote an article on the importance of marketing your book long before it is published. I called the article Pre-Natal Care for Your Book.

When Tony published my article on his blog in October 2009, he sent out this Tweet to his followers:

Pre-Natal Care for Your Book by @LynnSerafinn http://bit.ly/RJvaKI

Within two days, I received a Tweet from one of Tonys followers named @AllisonMaslan. Allison had never heard of me before, but when she saw Tonys Tweet she clicked the link and read the article I had written. Allison contacted me to ask if we could talk on Skype. When we spoke a day or so later, Allison told me she was getting ready to release her new book Blast Off through Morgan James Publishers. She said she was impressed with what I had written in my article and that she would like to hire me to create a book launch campaign for her book. Although I had been working behind the scenes as a marketing coach and consultant, this would be my first full-blown book launch apart from my own. Having learned from my mistakes, I wasnt going to be satisfied bringing Allison only into the top 20; I told her I wanted her book to go all the way to the top. Set with this intention, when Allison and I launched Blast Off in January 2010, the book did indeed hit the #1 spot in the entrepreneurship category on Amazon.

Both our professional lives were transformed significantly as a result of the success of that campaign. Allisons #1 status helped propel her into a thriving career as a television show host and high-profile mentor for entrepreneurs. I suddenly found myself with a long queue of author clients hoping I could help them achieve similar success. Within half a year, I built a whole new business with a team of seven people working with me to create dozens of bestseller launches, the vast majority of them reaching #1. But I began to notice my approach to marketing was significantly different from other approaches I had seen, and there were many things about mainstream marketing I viewed as unethical or harmful. This led me to write my book The 7 Graces of Marketing: how to heal humanity and the planet by changing the way we sell, which quickly became an international #1 bestseller in business ethics, marketing, and business communication when it was released in December 2011. While writing Tweep-e-licious! in autumn 2012, The 7 Graces of Marketing was selected as a finalist in the Brit Writer Awards and offered a foreign language translation deal in Indonesia. I was also in the start-up phase of the 7 Graces Project CIC (CIC stands for 'Community Interest Company'), a not-for-profit social enterprise providing training and mentorship in ethical marketing for a new generation of community-focussed entrepreneurs. It is unequivocally the culmination of my life's work.

I often tell people that Twitter changed my life. Truly, it has. But this change doesnt end with me: because I work exclusively with social changemakers, when the impact of their work spreads as a result of the marketing projects we create together, they in turn help transform the lives of many, many other people all around the planet.

And that is the story of the astounding butterfly effect of a single Tweet.

Perhaps you already have your own Twitter butterfly effect story to tell. If not, my hope is that you will by the time you read and apply the strategies in this book.

Why I Wrote This Book

Over the past few years, Ive read hundreds of complaints from people on both Facebook and Twitter about how they dont get Twitter. Just about every new client who comes to me admits they dont know how to use Twitter, and their lack of knowledge shows in the poor results they are reaping from it. It occurred to me that there was a need for a Twitter how to guide, written by someone who knew how to make the most of the phenomenon. But I long resisted writing such a guide because I knew that almost as soon as I published it, it would probably become obsolete due to constant change in the technology of social media.

I first took a chance by putting together a short Kindle eBook called Social Media on Autopilot in January 2012, hoping this would help give people a few useful technical tips about social media automation using a variety of third-party applications. Sure enough, while Social Media on Autopilot sold a lot of copies and received nice reviews when it first came out, within a month, Twaitter (one of the five software platforms I discussed in that book) completely changed when it introduced its new platform called Gremln. Within another month, Ping had been sold out to Seesmic and bore almost no resemblance to the product I had reviewed in the book. Then, both TweetDeck and HootSuite also changed some of their features, rendering just about all of my technical information obsolete. Finally, Tweet Adder became the defendant in a major court case with Twitter (something Ill talk about shortly). This experience drove a formidable nail in the coffin of the idea of putting any effort into writing another book on social media in the future.

But then, quite impulsively I decided to write this book, Tweep-e-licious!, about two months ago. The idea came to me after I had hosted an online meeting with members of our 7 Graces community. During the meeting, I asked the group, If this project could give you one thing, what would it be? Many people came forward to share what they most wanted, and nearly everyone said roughly the same thing: I want to be in a community of other ethical business owners who share my values so I dont feel like Im a weirdo, and I want help with