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Some Friendly #fridayflash Advice

Thanks to a little recent good press #fridayflash seems to really be taking off. As more and more writers join the fray, I thought it might be a good idea to share a little friendly advice on how to make the most of it as a participating author. Some flashers (who would have ever thought that would be a good term) are new to Twitter and may not know a few tricks of the trade, so to speak. A few are new to blogging, and might be overlooking a couple of simple things that will improve their rate of return visits. I offer the following in the spirit of constructive advice, and hope you will find it useful.

Tweet It Short and Sweet
One of the big advantages of taking part in #fridayflash is that other people will retweet your link. Make it easy on them. Keep your initial tweet short enough to allow for easy retweeting without making the reader edit your tweet to get it to fit. 140 characters is very unforgiving. Leave space for RT @yourhandle , (yes that final space is intentional). My sample here just took up 15 characters.

Information, Please
That said, make your tweet as informative as possible. Include the title of the story (short titles take up fewer characters), add a little teaser if you have room for it, as well as the URL and hashtag. It can be a challenge, but it can be done. Kevin J. Mackey (follow @kevinjmackey on Twitter) does it every week, in haiku no less!

Engage the Reader
Turn on the comment feature of your blog. Engage with your readership. It encourages return visits, sometimes even back and forth dialog. Make it easy for your readers to leave comments. I realize one way to cut down on spam is to make people register, but many people will not register on a new site just to leave a comment. I don't. One more account to keep track of. Allow anonymous comments and guard against spam by other means (CAPTCHA, or holding comments until approved).

Check the Spam
Speaking of spam, check your filter to make sure you are not killing good comments. I seem to get tagged as spam quite often for some reason (perhaps the long URL I use to point to my blog). It makes me sad. -weeping- -weeping-

Polish the Silver
As #fridayflash grows it will take more effort on the part of readers to visit, read, and comment on the stories presented. Inevitability they will begin to cull the list just to save time. To keep them interested in your stories give them a quality read. Over time they will begin to seek yours out. #fridayflash is an experiment in crowd-sourcing. In crowd-sourcing, the shiny silver gets noticed.

Help Me Out
On a personal note, I do The #fridayflash Report, usually on the following Saturday. It is a labor intensive task, with much cutting and pasting of tidbits of information to make a useful list. To help me do that please make the information I need easily accessible. Those items are:

• A shortened URL – I can deal with long URLs, but it means I have to copy and paste them into TinyURL and then copy and paste that into the report. It would be so much easier if I could just copy it directly from your Tweet.
  
• The title of the story – If it's in the Tweet I don't have to do another copy and paste from your blog.
  
• Your name – the name you would like have used as attribution in the report. It can be a moniker, but I need to know how to attribute you. In the tweet works best (by John Q Public), followed by a byline on the actual story, followed by your name in your Twitter profile. As a last resort I will dig through About Me pages for names, but it takes a lot of time. Eventually time constraints will force me to stop doing that. By the way, I think an author should always put a byline or copyright notice on any story they put out. It's yours, after all.
  

Remember, #fridayflash is open to all. You do not have to be on Twitter to participate. I will tweet links as long as you get me the information. You can do that by leaving a comment on the previous week's report, posting the info on the Facebook group page, or by sending it in an email. I won't post links to explicit erotica. Nor will I retweet or include them in the report. I'm not a prude, but I'd rather #fridayflash not be associated with that. My email address is jstro # swbell # net (do the appropriate substitutions).

We have a great group of writers here, and it is a pleasure to read your stories every week. You continue to amaze me and energize my own writing. Thank you so much for participating.

Now, write on.
~jon

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