During the “Twitter 2.0: Twitter Master Class For Publishing Professionals” presentation at BookExpo America, Brand New Brand You Inc. president Cindy Ratzlaff encouraged authors to try the “flock to unlock” technique on Twitter.
According to Ratzlaff, “your tweets are only alive for seven minutes” in your followers’ Twitter streams. The “flock to unlock” technique will help you keep a tweet alive for longer and find new readers.
She used Alternative Apparel’s Twitter feed as an example (tweet embedded below). The company promised to unlock a special sale code if more than 30 people retweeted a post about the sale.
Ratzlaff concluded:
How could authors do that? You might have a digital first chapter and let people download it. You might do a digital flash mob around that. [You could tweet]: ‘Just for today, the first chapter of the eBook is free if people retweet this.’ Fashion is doing this all the time now, but authors are not doing it. Think creatively about the flock to unlock campaign.
#TweetsTuesday is back! We just need 30 retweets to unlock the 30% off site-wide code. Start retweeting! alt-app.co/7m
— Alternative Apparel (@AlternativeApp) February 19, 2013