So, You Are On Twitter Plugging Away, Do You Actually Talk To People?

Absolutely. I don't see my followers as dollar signs. I interact with them and treat them like people.

--Roz Abellera

I send a note of thanks for a follow as a direct message, and sometimes I'll comment on something they have posted, but no, I don't chat with them. Never crossed my mind, actually. It's because it's so new to me.

I usually tweet about art stuff, and occasionally will share a funny moment from my day. I am really just getting used to Twitter - one of this year's goals is to learn it and use it as a marketing tool.

@roz: ok. so... what do you talk about? do you tweet about things that interest you or do you contact people directly, do you read all your followers?

@cynthia: i'm still stumbling around on twitter not getting it and always feeling like i'm talking into a void or an exceptionally large town square.

Ah Menega, you hit the nail on the head.

I feel like I'm standing on a milk crate at the world's largest rock concert trying to shout an anecdote about what happened at the bank that day.
Everytime I send a tweet I visualize echoes and cricket noises. :)

hahaha, exactly :)

"roz: ok. so... what do you talk about? do you tweet about things that interest you or do you contact people directly, do you read all your followers?"

I tweet the real me. I love art, music, movies, quotes from historical figures, electric guitars. I love all these things and it's the real me. I just don't tweet my art all the time trying to sell. If one of followers contacts me with something I posted I respond back.

I try to read as many followers as I can but it's too hard to get to all of them, I have over 10,000 on Twitter.

--Roz Abellera

@roz: right, so i guess being yourself you are also having more fun on twitter? and how on earth do you manage to read anything at all of what your 10.000 followers tweet?

Twitter, as it appears to me, is a million people crammed into one room, all talking at once, about themselves, with their fingers stuck in their ears.

*lol*, jim!

and yet, there's people out there making it work, getting others to listen.

"@roz: right, so i guess being yourself you are also having more fun on twitter? and how on earth do you manage to read anything at all of what your 10.000 followers tweet?"


Yes, that's how I approach my whole art thing- I have fun with it. It comes natural because I love it.

My philosophy is just be the real you at all times. Those who like you will stick, those who don't will go away. That's the way I like it. I like to show people the real me.

I'm not able to get through 10,000+ all the time but I do the best I can

--Roz Abellera

Twitter has been good to me, I've had people like bbc wildlife magazine,WWF, hahnemuhle etc follow me which has helped with my networking. You'd be surprised how many people look at your work when someone with a little blue tick next to their name re tweets it for you :)

@roz: even just getting through a couple hundred is a remarkable feat. a number of my followers are very wordy, prob just following to collect followers themselves.
@paul: not surprising at all, congratulations! was that sheer luck or were you clever somehow (i mean apart from talented)?

Twitter, to me, is like going fishing. You never know if the fish are biting or if they ever bite, but you drop the line and hope for the best.

I post manually; don't use one of those auto-post things. I do get several followers who re-tweet a lot.

Networking really menega. I spent months emailing magazines with my work. Eventually two took my images on and gave me a good double page spread and it kind of snowballed from there. One of my tweets went a bit crazy with something like 200 re tweets which got me noticed by BBC springwatch and BBC wildlife mag, another chap called Ray Mears favourited one of my tweets which then got noticed by others, with WWF I simply uploaded a photo to their Facebook page which got 500 odd likes in 24 hours, next thing they're following me on Twitter. Hanemuhle saw some of my images on twitter and followed. I'm going after Canon next, I'm already networking with them but there's thousands of others like me that want to work with them

@paul: aha, you certainly know what you are doing! :)

@chuck: going fishing is a good description of the process.

I have varied interests outside photography and do engage in talk about sports, politics (try not to very much), or reply to interesting tweets from the sources I follow. All artist following all artist is like a merry go round in my opinion. The buyers are not going to come from FAA followers.

Some very successful internet marketers do nothing but automated posts. But you have to watch who you follow and who is following you. If someone chooses to follow you knowing full well what you do, then follow them back and don't feel obligated or guilty if all you do is trade promotions all day long. And when you get thousands of followers who has time to keep track of them? I got on Twitter to market products and not to chit chat with friends so like most things it's what you make of it.

I enjoy reading my Twitter feed. If I follow a chronic poster who fills up my feed, I unfollow them.
I often like or respond to some posts. Occasionally I'll retweet, but not often.
I hate chronic retweeters too, and usually turn those off.

It seems like the same crowd responds, and many That I follow are too busy tweeting to reply. I don't follow them for long.

I interact with several followers, mostly taking an interest in what they're up to. Some are people I know, others are people with similar interests.

I interact with some people however it depends on the conversation that is initiated. Some people want to interact so they can tag you and will use your newsfeed to advertise their agenda. -----BLOCK----

So far I have sent 28 thousand tweets. How many sales has that garnered me? I can't say, but advertising is advertising.

You just keep on trucking and hope for the best.

I just tweet for the search engine bots. I never read tweets. Luckily cell coverage is poor around here so I have time to live life.

pretty broad range then, i see. for those of you who interact, do you actively go out fishing in the huge twitter pool (for people who might be interested in your stuff) and initiate a conversation to reel them in?

I'm a horrible tweeter. I just post and have no idea how anyone makes use out of twitter.

I do tweet other things than just sales pitches, blog articles, retweets, even jokes.
--mary ellen anderson

Fishing is a must! I took a photo of a very elegant and rich lady in red during the recent Breeders Cup Championships. I was reviewing those photos and assumed she was an owner. So I zoomed in on her name tag and looked her up. Found her stable on tweeter and tweeted a photo of their horse and wished them luck in 2015. Of course they have thousands of photos of their horses but you just never know if you have the one they don't have. Another owner saw one of my photos of his horse and favorited it! Sometimes I just send my portfolio around the world using #london #paris #dubai #rome #beverlyhills #newyork etc... I think a tweet has the life expectancy of about 3-5 minutes.

I have just under 1000 followers ... because I don't follow back. I only follow those who RT my stuff. So ..... I get followers who, because I don't follow back, dump me in a day or two.

When someone RT's my stuff after they've followed me, I'll highlight their content in tweets or RT some of their stuff. I don't ever talk to them or thank them because and RT does much more ... it networks them.

Also, I don't sell on Twitter. I don't post content from a platform with a shopping cart. I post my photography from my blog or from Flickr. It's all about sharing value messages ( how to use it, not what it does ). The key for me is not how many followers I can get, but how many RT's I can get per tweet. I average now 2-6 RT's every ohter tweet.

Finally, I have two Twitter accounts. A public for general photography and art, and a private by invite only. The private I use like an email newsletter ... it is my customers from all the services that I provide.

Hope this information is helpful to you Menega. Enjoy your day.

and how on earth do you manage to read anything at all of what your 10.000 followers tweet?

Menega, do you use the list feature that's available in Twitter? You can make lists of people who you want to follow so that you will be able to see only their tweets and this helps immensely in keeping your feed uncluttered. I have found this to be very effective, especially because you click on the list that you've created and you see all your "favorite tweeters" in one place. It helps to categorize your lists too. You could create one for art, music, photography, etc., you get the idea. You can choose to make your lists public or private. Try it out, you might be surprised how easy it is to unclutter your feed by managing the people you follow using lists.

Cheers!

Menega,

I have 16.4k followers, I follow 15.5k. My fan base when I unfollow the nonfollowers is over 2000 people
who follow me without me following them. That number keeps growing.

I use unfollowers.com It is not a sanctioned Twitter app.

I add about 850 followers from wherever every other day. I unfollow folks at that same time. I have been at this since late
September I think. October maybe.

I have only made 596 tweets. My power score seen somewhere a month ago was 132k roughly. This is out of over 280 million accounts.
The ultimate goal is to be Verified as a personality on Twitter. This means your status for how you add followers etc changes for the better.
Verified accounts live by different rules.

In the process as a non verified account of using unsanctioned apps to add larger numbers I can be simply deleted by Twitter at any time.
This is very common. Or it was. Twitter's growth has slowed recently. Twitter needs who ever it can get and keep right now. My luck.

As a sale channel....well my first sale probably came through Twitter. I do not know for certain. I first went after the fashion industry and salons
for some crazy reason, but there is no bad group to go after. The probably buyer was a salon possibly out in Patterson CA. The Mona Lisa Salon.

I get not only bots, but actual views from Twitter on a daily basis. Numbers wise Twitter followers see my work more than anyone else. But those followers
are not in the market generally to buy. Just are not.

I offer Pinterest to the intersted, and there is a flow of Twitter followers to my Pinterest account. This is very useful.

People who want a small channel for communications are all good, but I would not do this on Twitter. Usually people who do this are avoiding doing
it on FB. I have one friend who is very young and does not want be to married and having kids yet, so she likes Twitter. When I went extremely commercial
on Twitter I was polluting her view, so she ex'ed me.

Twitter works well from the small one person with few followers to the mega users with 100k followers. But finding collectors is a big problem.

I do respond. I keep conversations simple. I have learned to comprehend those different approaches with different people through experiences. None of
those conversations have to be very long. The last one was about weather here in New England v Australia. Nice lady. Still she was only another artist.

Sometimes I find someone who can help my marketing. Most of the help I get is either in these forums or other Twitter followers. That said on Twitter if I dont
initiate the suggestion of helping and getting helped, I never allow any Twitter Guru to tell me a thing.

I got a spam email the other day. I looked up the link on the spam email. I then placed that link into the Alexa services. The site did not rank. I rank. I should be
selling to them, the con artists. Afremovart.com ranks something like 801k. I rank 19 million. I was 28 million only 1 month ago.

I automate most of my Twitter stuff. I just dont see anything that is productive about do it all manually. JMO

Dave

When Meryl Streep slandered Walt Disney, I, um, discussed it with her. Via Twitter. Sort of. She never got back to me. :D I also got into a stupid discussion with some very angry, bitter, narrow people about the same subject. Feh. Learned my lesson.

If I see something interesting on my feed, I'll retweet it and sometimes comment. I also like to play the word games people get started there.

Right now I have around 150 followers, for what's that's worth.

I have 2,400 followers that I have been growing since I started on Twitter in mid November. I have issued 624 tweets of which only maybe 50 are RTs. In the beginning I retweeted more when I didn't have so many followers and there was less to look through. Now I only RT something that particularly catches my eye but I don't have time to read everything so it is the occasional quick scan. In the beginning I talked more about my day and myself or how my art was developing but there was little interaction (the black hole phenomenon). However, these days every time I tweet a piece of artwork or a product with the artwork on it I get several RTs - it is a surprise if something isn't retweeted. My audience is very mixed and I have specifically targeted people who might have an interest in my work. Each time I produce a new piece I think about the likely audience and then look for them. I have figured out the times of day that are most successful for my tweets for my audience and when not to bother. I use Hootsuite and set up in a advance a week of scheduled tweets, every day usually twice a day to allow for time zones often around a weekly theme, for example Valentines or promoting products on one of my POD sites. I find more RTs if there is a picture attached than if it is just words with the exception of my blog, but that isn't always the case, sometimes the title of a piece catches someone's eye. Occasionally my work gets featured in someone else's on-line newsletter and there have been spin offs from that. You really have to put in a lot of effort to start with and then you get into more of a routine with it.

I don't use any apps to grow my number of followers because I wanted to gauge my growth organically. Right now, I only have about 190 followers, and I can thank Leonid Afremov for at least half of those. I had a big uptick when he followed me and retweeted one of my posts, and I've been pretty much flatlined ever since. Perhaps that's because I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to Twitter.

I don't use Hootsuite to grow followers (I don't know if it even does that) I actively look for them and follow them to make sure they are people who either will RT or might be interested in my stuff.

I think Afremov and Sipo whatever his last name is follow just about everybody. They were early on with me as well.

Each SM is its own world. It takes time to comprehend each one as you go. Working them together you get bonus points. JMO

I just dont seem to care about FB for commercial purposes. Twitter is like handing out business cards where if one business on
a given day does not want your card, then their competitors and I mean a dozen competitors at a whack may take your card without
you so much as leaving your computer chair.

After that the less you put yourself out there the more. As I said I have fewer than 600 tweets. And now a days I often have goodly
numbers of RT on all of my stuff.

Channeling people on Twitter who like Pinterest will pay off well in the long run. I like P's commercialism.

Dave

I am interested in art, so I follow artists. If I like their work I retweet it - many of my followers are also art lovers, photographers, birdwatchers (things I am interested in). They favourite or retweet, not just my work but many of the artists I have retweeted. This way things get circulated, viewed, and I get new followers(interested in the same stuff). Many people use twitter as a soap box. They just want as many followers as possible to push their own work. They don't follow back, they don.t interact, they don't retweet others. Not very social. If you enjoy viewing other artists' work and helping to promote them then twitter is great. I just wish people would retweet more. It really is very easy to do. Don't be so self centred.

https://twitter.com/DavidBridburg

Over the last few weeks I ran an experiment, no images v images prior.

Images prior got far more RTs.

Just some food for thought, we are in the image business, give them what they want.

Dave

Addition: I am running my own business here. I openly have told people where I think I am getting value. I have no intention of promoting other artists on my Twitter feed. They can sell themselves beyond showing other artists their work. I do that and get lots of RTs. I encourage all of you to do better than showing us your work again only this time over on Twitter. Like I said you can reach out with only a "follow" to any industry in the world and leave off your calling card. Why just ask artists to take another look? I have art already. I have over the years bought art locally. I have supported other artists. I do not ask your support in buying my prints, but I am freely discussing marketing to other groups of people.

Yes i talk to them, but with those who are interested in my photos(not necessarily to buy them). Whit thousands of followers is hard to have real relationships with someone.

However Iuse Twitter, and invite to use Twitter, anyone wants to ask me something about the products I sell because for me it's more comfortable.

I tweet images only 3/4 times a day maximum. This is because the tweets with images have many RTs and FAVs, but less clicks. Without the picture who is interested is forced to enter the site, and this is what I want. Better than having many RT and few real views.

Andrea,

The images v no images is the debate. Thanks for your feedback. As I said I am seeing an uptick in viewers from
twitter to my website, along with a good flow of people joining me at P. So may be my currently no images is better.
Fewer RTs but better.

This is the comprehension thing I was trying to talk about earlier. There are many different levels of engagement.

BTW, I also found Twitter extremely impersonal. It took me a while to come to grips with that. It is a waste land of followers
you never talk to again. And yet they can RT your work without images, they can click on your work any time they see it in a stream,
they can see new releases......or they can never see you ever again......

These are realities of showing in a gallery for a month, people coming into the gallery window shopping and disappearing without you ever knowing them.

It is all part of the process I am finding out.

Dave

really interesting this thread. so many different approaches that seem to get the job done. for me, i've decided to have more fun, to talk to people, tweet within reason what interests me (and i have alot of interests) and also occasionally retweet someone else's art that i find stunning.

am still not fathoming what some people are aiming for when they retweet a steady stream of other people's work. i have no idea from what *their* work is and then i unfollow.

@sai: yes, i know about lists but didn't use them well i must say. reorganized those in the last two days so i'm seeing more of what interests me.

@david: ok, now i finally understand what you are doing, you're aiming at being a verified account.

@JL: i'm following Cher, that's my twitter dose of outspoken, opinionated celebrity... :)

re the discussion to tweet with or without image, i guess a mixture might be good if you are someone with a broader range of themes or work in different styles.

anyway, thanks for everones thoughts here!

Menega,

A good suggestion for me made recently elsewhere was to Tweet the image and then add a second tweet with hashtags right a way.

People using hashtags get into the search engine. This ups the viewing results.

I do not go to Twitter to see anyone else's work. My stream with all sorts of other people's work on it, I ignore it completely.

If you want a slower smaller group in a closed sort of network you add a follower validation app. You get away from the automation of
the whole process. I respect that and leave it alone.

I mainly respond to folks who say something about my art. If they just leave off some sort of HELLO DAVID, well that was automated. I keep
moving.

The whole thing even within the smaller informal networks is very impersonal. Shockingly so. It took me two weeks to get used to that
and value time elsewhere.

Dave