Twitter for Writers

Every author has his or her unique target audience. My author friends and I discuss how we reach out to this target audience every day, with every book, or more importantly, with our author brand. While some of us are attracting readers from Facebook, others are gaining more attention and sales from Twitter. Some poets and writers benefit more from their Instagram activity.

In my case, Twitter wins hands down. Twitter is my favourite social media channel for three reasons:

1) Twitter is the place where I first got the chance to interact with my favourite established authors.

2) Twitter has a supportive indie author community that helps spread the word about your books and you.

3) Tweets don’t require a large word count – only careful use of language and hash tags.

When I was advising an author friend about using Twitter effectively to build up her audience and sales figures, I told her these things – all learnings that I’ve picked up over the last one year.

– You can’t just post links to your books all day long and expect people to follow you and buy your work. You must INTERACT with other Twitter users. That means replying to tweets, retweeting other writers’ tweets, and clicking likes too. It’s all about give and take. Or spreading the Twitter love and getting it back in the same way.

– The next thing is as important; You can’t just like, retweet and tweet and log off. You have to ENGAGE with others using the platform. Tweet something that starts a conversation. Participate in interesting threads related to writing or anything else. But DO NOT tag everyone you know. That pisses off everyone.

– And finally, remember that this is the age of CONTENT driven marketing. Your Twitter feed can’t get you any attention if it isn’t keeping your followers hooked. Whatever you tweet (in addition to your book links and excerpts and amazon rankings) has to be cool enough to make people keep coming back for more. Once they love your content, more Twitter users will find out about you and your tweets and come by.

Here are some hash tags you should be using.

#amwriting

#writers

#writing

#writerslife

#amreading

#writinglife

#indieauthor

#indiebooksbeseen

#indiebooksblast

#indiebookspromo

#weekendreads

#summereading

#romancereaders

#kidsbook

#YA

#YAlit

#childrensbook

I love using and learning about social media as I grow as a writer. Recently, I completed an online certification course from Google that taught me so much about online marketing. It was free!

Hope my Twitter tips help you.