A couple of months ago, I finally took the plunge and got serious about learning Twitter. In addition to the New York/Tri-State chapter of Sisters in Crime, I also belong to the Guppies chapter. "Guppies" stands for "Great Unpublished," although many of the members have now gotten published. Happily, many of the published Gups stick around to help those not yet published, and when published Guppy Krista Davis, author of the Domestic Diva Mysteries, offered to give an informal class on Twitter, I immediately signed up. I'm glad I did.
Twitter is a gold mine for writers who know how to use it. Following Krista's suggestion, I downloaded TweetDeck and set up columns to load in tweets with certain hashtags, which are the same as keywords. When picking out the hashtags for each column, I found a number of great lists of good hashtags for writers. After testing out all the recommendations, I've come up with my own list. It's much shorter than most, but it includes the hashtags I've found most useful and interesting in the past month. They are:
#amwritingCheck them out and let me know what you think. And if you have any favorites of your own, please share them.
#writing
#writetip
#writingtips
#amediting
#editing
#askeditor
#askagent
#pubtip
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6 comments:
Great post, Elaine! Congrats on making the plunge ~ it can seem daunting at first, but it is worth it, as you have learned. Twitter is such an information-sharing tool, and you're right ~ it's a gold mine for writers who know how to use it.
The hashtags you've provided are all helpful ones that I use, too. If the timing is right, I jump in on Twitter chats ~ most are scheduled, but they can work as hashtags (like #ScriptChat, #ScribeChat, #BlogChat).
I know this is a comprehensive list that covers more than chats for writers, but in case you or our readers are interested, here's the link:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=ruaz3GZveOsoXUOOt86B3AQ#gid=0
Some other hashtags I'll check from time to time:
#guppies
#writegoal
Enjoy your time on Twitter, getting to know fellow writers, editors, bloggers, and learning new things and sharing information. Have fun!
I also joined twitter recently, but I am not sure I have really learned to swim yet. So a post about how to make sense of the tide is always useful!
I find my Twitter stream already moves too fast for me to follow most days, so the whole "follow these hashtags" thing just adds another layer of complexity. I do like the site http://tweetchat.com/, however, which is a "live chat" site for the hashtags. So if the #askagent chat is actually in progress, I am more apt to head to tweetchat and enter that hashtag, so I don't get distracted by what's going on in other columns!
I haven't tried tweet chat, but I might! I thought #amwriting was people tweeting that they were going to be composing not tweeting for the next bit. Is it that they are writing in general?
Kathy- Glad you liked the post. You were the original person who got me interested in Twitter and who taught me the basics. Thanks!
Dorte- Glad to help, even just this tiny bit.
Laura- TweetChat and the hashtags finally made Twitter make sense to me. The live stream seems useless to me because everything moves by way too fast. Also, everything is jumbled together. In TweetChat, it's all divided into separate columns according to the hashtags you've chosen to follow.
Clare- People use #amwriting for a variety of writing-related tweets. My understanding is that it's the #1 hashtag that writers follow.
What a helpful post! I've been wanting to really learn how to use Twitter, too, and TweetDeck is a HUGE help. Thanks!
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