Automated Tweeting Experiment

CONTINUED from main page of the blog.

by David Griffin
 

I constructed the tweets (I've sent him 8 or ten) and here's one as an example:

What’s a monk do for fun? Find out
@MonkInTheCellar bit.ly/18fTGp3


In each tweet is a bitly link back to the web page Indie Promotor created for me.  It's a simple page with my bio and links to Kindle and Amazon so you can buy my books.  If you want to check his page for me it's here:

http://indiepromotor.com/david-griffin/

Although Indie Promotor (his name is David Weeks) specializes in Kindle and other epubs, he agreed to also list my print editions on Amazon.

Multiplying 3 tweets per day times 30 days times the same 76,000 followers of Indie Promotor we can state that on 6,840,000 occasions, someone ... often the same person, of course ... saw a tweet pop up in their mail about Monk In The Cellar.  At the end of three months that figure will be 20 million.  And that does not take into account the re-tweets, some by people who also have thousands of followers.  I've seen numbers like 1800 and I remember a retweet by a fellow who had over 21,000 followers.

Sounds impressive.  Surely some of those tweets resulted in the sale of even my two dollar novelettes.  Not so, but in a moment I'll get to the results for the first thirty days.

Here's why the results won't be very impressive.  First, we know nothing about the 76,000 followers.  Second, some ... maybe a high number ... may be annoyed with their reader filling up with tweets, and are not in a mood to buy anything I might write.  Although almost all the retweets I've seen have been simply a replay of the original without any comment, I did see one where the retweeter answered the question, "What's a monk do for fun?" by commenting "Probably not send out the same tweets endlessly."

There are other reasons, but I don't want to make this a scholarly paper.  Here's a more quantitative report of the first month's results.  I've seen a very, very slight uptick on hits to my Monk In The Cellar Blog and my main web page for Windswept Press.  I would not swear in court that the reason for this tiny increase in hits is due to Indie Promotor's Tweets.  My sales on Amazon and Kindle have increased by exactly zero.  That's right, I haven't sold a book in the last thirty days.  I didn't sell a book in the thirty days before, either, but clearly over 7 million tweets and retweets have not lifted my book off the launch pad.

I will wait  for the end of the  3 month period to make a final judgement.  Who knows?  Maybe something will take off.  But  I'm forming the opinion, despite  the success with  Twitter by others, that it's not working for me.

I consider the $55 a very good investment.  It is always good to try something and if it costs money it is usually money well spent.  If in fact tweeting (at least in this manner) doesn't prove to be beneficial to me after two more months, I will be happy to have spent $55 to find out rather than waste a lot of time tweeting in the future.

Now would be a good time for any of you to use the Comment facility on this blog to give me your thoughts.  I'm sure someone wants to comment about my using the same tweets over and over.

-  Dave Griffin