Twitip

by Brian Anderson of Dog Eat Doug – Follow him @dogeatdoug.

Before you click away saying “hey, you’re a print cartoonist, you can’t tweet the comics page”, I’ll disclose a bit of history. My comic started online before it appeared in that new-fangled invention called the ‘newspaper, as a result I focus mainly on my web readers.  It’s more fun to chat online rather than second-hand hate mail passed along by disgruntled feature editors (yes, if you knock “Mary Worth” out of a newspaper you get death threats).

And by far the best place to get new readers is through social media. Much easier to tweet, stumble or digg a comic to a friend then cut it out of a paper and mail it. As a cartoonist if you plug into the viral bloodstream of the virtual social hangouts, the rewards are great: you can gain readers, keep up with friends new and old, and stalk your favorite celebrities from the comfort of your iPhone.

And for me, the best hangout by far has been twitter. For lack of a better cliche, it’s my water cooler (I work from home and twitter keeps me from chasing squirrels around the yard in a two-sizes too small Spiderman costume. Yes, you’re welcome for the visual). I’ll just share a bit of what I’ve done in tweetland to grow the readership of “Dog eat Doug”.

I. KEYWORD SOCIAL – Yup, the real secret to any social media, and especially twitter, is in that warm moniker “Social Media”. If you tweet away for people to read your latest blog post about deer scat shaped like dead presidents, or tweet your latest sinus infection status every twenty seconds you’d be better off pasting toll booths with stickers to promote your comic.

Just jump in there and chat. Or, if you have a hankering to tweet with other people who collect hangnails of B-list actors, then check out the numerous twitter search engines. Really, though start with your niche, cartoons. Seek out other cartoonists, comic bloggers and of course people actually discussing comics on twitter.

II. AUTOMATE IN MODERATION – Put the moldy tomatoes down. I don’t like emotionally bankrupt auto responders in twitter either. Especially the generic messages you get after following someone that tells you how much they’re looking forward to have a rich and rewarding conversation with you. Dude, it’s a 140 characters a shot, step off.

However, I have found a gem of a method for using tweet automation. In fact, it has helped make twitter my number one source of traffic after search engines. I’ll reiterate the moderation part. You can’t create a droid army of scheduled, daily tweets. It has to be balanced out with meaningful conversation. So here’s how I do it right now:

1. I create trackable links to my site with Hoot Suite. As of now, Hoot Suite let’s you schedule tweets for a later date, but lacks the functionality to automatically tweet it everyday. That’s when I jump to:

2. I paste the links from Hoot Suite into Future Tweets. Now I can add my 140 characters and set it to post everyday. I set up four different tweets with unique links to fly out daily.

Watch your stats and see what copy and what times of day work best. Then go back and test out different verbiage and times. Keep tweaking it to optimize your clicks and re-tweets (more on that in a bit, hang on) and also to keep the tweets fresh.

Cartoonists have an advantage in the auto tweet department. Readers know comic sites update frequently. And if people enjoy your comic, you’re simply reminding them there’s a new strip waiting to make them laugh hysterically and excrete coffee through their nasal passages. Everyone knows success in the comic strip world is measured in singed nose hairs.

The key to success of automated tweets is to take the robotic, Terminator “are you Sarah Connor” feel out of it. How? Easy, go back to point #1 – keep it social. Interact with everyone that replies or re-tweets your auto tweets. Trust me, people figure out pretty quick if your just spamming twitter with links to your site.

And how to you get people to re-tweet other than out of the goodness of their hearts? Simple: ask them to re-tweet. I usually tell people if that day’s strip made them laugh please re-tweet. You both win by spreading four paneled joy throughout the twitterverse.

It’s also important to tweet and re-tweet comics you read. This has a lot of advantages. You’ll be providing fun, valuable links to your followers and along the way you’ll bump into fellow cartoonists. Before you know it you’re part of a warm and fuzzy cartooning twitter commune.

III. ORGANIZE - After a month on twitter I only had about two hundred followers and was following roughly the same amount of people. That’s not a ton of tweets to scan through and the twhirl application was more than enough to keep up with DM’s and RT’s. I had taken Tweet Deck for a test drive and thought it was a like building a traffic control tower for an Air Hogs helicopter.

Once my followers crept above 700, twhirl was sweating hard and twice I caught it trying to chuck itself into the recycle bin. It was time to send twhirl to the home for neglected apps and jump into the monster truck named Tweet Deck. Well, it was painfully obvious that my initial impression of TD (yah, that’s how cool people on twitter refer to Tweet Deck) was dead wrong. Now TD rules my twitter life and thankfully so.

First thing you need to do in TD is label people. Coral them into groups. This makes it a lot easier to follow conversations for specific topics. I have a group for comics, writers and pets. It’s up to you to keep the neutering comments out of the tweets about todays “Pearls before Swine” strip.

IV. SEEK AND YOU SHALL FIND – Want to jump start your new twitter life? Just search for what you want to talk about. This is especially useful for cartoonists. Click over to your favorite twitter search engine (my choice right now is Twazzup) and enter a topic. I pop in “webcomics” and “comics” most of the time. Now I’m plugged into other cartoonists, comic blogs and every fanboy that tweets so much they’ve mind melded with the twitter API.

You can also check out Twellow or TwitterTroll.

V. FACEBOOK – A quick handy dandy tip for Facebook users. Before twitter, Facebook was my main social outlet for promoting “Dog eat Doug”. It was obvious that twitter was basically Facebook without all the clutter. Just pure conversation.

How does one keep up Simple solution: get the twitter app for Facebook and your tweets auto post to Facebook. The only drawback is that it splits the conversation and you can end up with twitter and facebook tugging on your sleeves both vying for your attention. Such is the price for dancing at the social media ball.

UPDATE: Tweet Deck now has Facebook integration so if you get the big TD it comes with the flock slaying stone.

VI. LINK IT UP! – Your twitter url is just as powerful as your site url or a business card. Plaster it on everything: your website, your email signature, put it on your comic strip and tattoo it on your cat.

I just started putting my twitter url on the print version of my strip. Obviously it’s hard to track traffic that comes from newspapers but I figure I can at least look for a correlation between visitor spikes and the print date of the strips with the url. We’ll see how that works. In the meantime, you should put it on your web comic graphic. You never know where your strip will turn up online so you might as well send along your calling card.

The lifeblood of cartoonists is readers. If someone nails a Farside cartoon to a tree in the forest, and no one’s around, do the squirrels laugh? I have no idea what that means. The important thing is that you work hard everyday to build your audience. Twitter is one of the best ways to do it. Social Media is just the virtual incarnation of word of mouth, and that is still the most powerful tool in existence.

One last tip: avoid political arguments on twitter unless you’re truly curious how many swears you can fit into 140 characters.