Join the Masquerade Crew Street Team (Free promotion for you)

Due to a variety of reasons, engagement is down on Twitter. Simply throwing out tweets isn't doing the trick anymore. Sure, retweets, likes, and comments still happen but at a much less frequent rate.

One of the biggest engagement killers is Twitter itself. Although not as bad as Facebook, Twitter's algorithm pushes most of my tweets below, showing people the most engaging tweets first. This is clearly seen when I retweet other people's tweets. Those retweets are retweeted more often than my straight tweets, promotional or not. The more people who engage in a tweet makes it more likely that the tweet will be seen by yet more people. The very definition of viral.

In other words, I need to find ways to encourage engagement.

In order to research other methods of engagement, I've been doing author support threads. I link several tweets together in a thread, some of the tweets tagging authors on Twitter in #Follow tweets while others have links to Cover Wars as well as other promotional and non-promotional material.

Engagement spikes when I do author support threads. And not just as soon as they go out but sometimes hours or even a day later. There are also times when there is a spike and there's no thread in sight, but these times do correspond with some activity: more retweets, likes, comments than the average.

What does this tell me? It tells me that engagement, even if it's artificial, increases the number of eyeballs that see my tweets. I mention authors in a #Follow tweet. They retweet, like it, and comment on it. That helps that thread go mini viral, the difference of a hundred people potentially seeing it to more than a thousand potential eyeballs. Maybe even more.

That's where my Twitter marketing needs to go, and you (authors, readers, bloggers, and anyone else) are invited to join me.

Not only do I want to continue doing author support threads, I want to expand them. In addition to the content I've already been putting in threads, I want to add lots of content from you guys and have you push the content to more people by engaging with the tweets.

Thread ideas: Writing tips, quotes from reviews, quotes about writing or reading, discussion questions, pictures of people reading, and really anything else we come up with. The idea is to get people paying attention, which in theory should help everyone involved.

Since I don't have exact plans, all I'm asking for right now is an email address and a Twitter username. I'm also including a blank for an Instagram username, for I will reproduce this idea on Instagram should we figure it out on Twitter.

I'll mostly communicate with you via Twitter. The email is only handy should the discussion need to be longer or more in-depth. For reference: my email is msl_007@live.com. If you are on Instagram, include that, and I'll be sure to follow you over there. My username is the same as Twitter: masqcrew.

At first I'll mention you in idea generating threads. I may also mention you in #follow tweets.

But I'm not going to inundate you with notifications. That would not encourage engagement; it would incite possible violence against me. Everyone who signs up will reside in a Google Spreadsheet so I'll easily be able to document when I mention you; thus, I'll easily be able to spread out the mentions so you aren't overwhelmed.

Anyway, if you would like to experiment with me in getting our joint content out there, fill out the form below.