A Very Social February

February is all about love because of Valentines Day, but at the Blog Book Tours Yahoo!Group, the assignments for the month focus on the social marketing groups we all know... and maybe hate. These include Facebook, MySpace, Goodreads, and Twitter.

We're starting with Twitter because it's the fastest, easiest, and most powerful for marketing your other websites. It's also less of a time-suck than the more complex social forums. There are other added benefits about Twitter networking that I'll point out later.

In a nutshell, Twitter is a micro-blogging site that allows snappy posts of 140 characters. To participate, you follow other Twitter users and this allows you to see their updates. You in turn, are followed, and those people can read what you have to say. Keep this scenario in mind, because it's the key to how Twitter works, or how it doesn't if you don't "get it". Believe me, many people don't, and consequently feel it's a waste of time.

Now, to get started, and before the following and socializing begins, you need a few things upfront:

1. An email account that is acceptable on Twitter like yahoo or hotmail



2. A name that coordinates with your other website efforts if possible - I use blogbooktours everywhere I can



3. A small photo for your homepage and post icon



4. A well-written short bio



5. The website link you will send readers to for more information
   

Now you're ready to set up your Twitter account. Go to http://twitter.com/ and follow the directions, plugging in the information above.

Once you've gotten this far, you're ready to practice entering some updates. Introduce yourself in one, leave a blog link in another, tell us what you're doing today in a third. Do this several times more, perhaps throughout the day, to get Twitter into your conciousness and just to practice writing concise but meaningful messages. Be sure to bookmark your Twitter page to make it one of your regular stops several times during the day, much like checking your email.

Now you're ready to start following people and have them follow you back. We'll talk about how to do that in the next post.

And then you can follow me @twitter!

Blog Book Tours Help

If you're an author visiting here for the first time, welcome to Blog Book Tours. We are here to support our Yahoo!Group, which is a peer network for published authors contemplating their own virtual tour. The site was started by Dani Greer who felt the notion had good potential to help authors keep down expenses, and was the only logical way to tour a book with the challenges we all face due to climate change and other environmental issues. Blog book tours are simply too good an idea not to promote.

The best way to understand more about the concept of blog book tours, is to click over to Dani's guide called The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever. This will give you a run-down of what you, as an author, will need to do to plan your own blog tour. Once you've read that, click over to the Y! group and join. Folks there will be glad to answer questions and help you brainstorm ideas you have for your own tour.

If you'd like to host an author on your own blog, Helen Ginger has created a very useful guide to explain what will be expected of you. The most obvious points are that you have a very popular blog, and that the blog theme relates to the subject matter of the book you're hosting. Common sense there, and Helen's guide is filled with more obvious and not-so-obvious pointers.

Finally, remember that your own tour begins with a good blog of your own. Our support group has a Blog-a-Day Challenge twice a year, and even if you don't have a book to tour yet, it's never too early to start getting your tools in place for that kind of book promotion. It 's a long planning process and a year is not to soon to start thinking about and preparing for your own blog book tour. Start posting on your blog often to increase it's readership, and start searching for potential tour hosts. These two aspects take time and energy, and can't be accomplished the week before your anticipated tour. Give yourself at least three months of concentrated effort.

Are you considering a blog book tour for your book? If so, when? Or have you toured a book this way already? Would you consider doing it again? Leave us your comments.