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More on Self-Promotion:
Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Paperback) by Dave Evans (Author), Susan Bratton (Foreword)
Promoting Your Writing on Twitter
by Terrie Lynn Bittner
Twitter is a rather unusual form of social media. It allows you to tell the
world what you’re up to. The catch? You have to tell them in 140 characters or less. If you tend to be wordy, learning to use Twitter will improve your writing.
Twitter can be a fun and free way to promote your writing, but you have to play by the rules to make it work. The first step is to get an account. When you fill out your brief biography, put in a lot of keywords. Those keywords are used by other Twitterers to decide who to follow.
Followers are people who decide they’re interested in what you’re doing and what you have to say about the world. When they select you to follow, they get everything you post on their own Twitter page to read. You want to find the kinds of followers who will be interested in the types of things you write on. My own profile says:
Author of homeschooling books, LDS, teach ESL (volunteer), interested in poverty relief.” Because of those words, people who homeschool follow me. Those are the people I want to have reading my book. I also get followers interested in other aspects of my life, and when they choose to follow me, I can choose to follow them. A properly done profile allows me to find people I’m interested in. Be sure you also list your website or blog. This is one way people decide who to follow. They want to know who you are.
Use a real picture of yourself, not a cartoon sort of thing. Become real to your followers so they think of you as a friend.
Spend time studying other Twitterers before you get started. This will help you avoid mistakes. Follow the rules so when you promote yourself, people are happy, not irritated.
First, don’t make every post a promotion. Create a mixture of personal (but not too personal) posts, helpful posts, and promotional posts. For instance, you might share a great article you found on writing fiction in the morning, post about your struggles with a character you’re creating in the afternoon, and then later on add a link to your new blog post, with a bit of information on what it’s about. When you post a link to your own work, only do it once. Reposting it over and over is spam and completely irritates your followers.
If you’re lucky, others will retweet your links to your work. This means they will forward your post to all those who follow them, giving you extra publicity. To encourage this, retweet others as well.
Interact with those you follow, sending friendly comments on their posts and the things they’re promoting. Build relationships.
You will have others deciding to follow you. You should almost always follow them back. Keep the number of people you follow almost equal to those who follow you. If you follow 400 people and only five are following you, people will wonder what’s wrong with your posts. So add new people to follow slowly, and build up content before you do. Try to have at least ten posts, with interesting content, before you follow anyone. This way, they’re more likely to follow you. Spread the posts out so you do a few each day.
However, do watch for spammers. When someone follows you, look at their posts and their websites, and avoid those who look like they’re out to do nothing but self-promote or who promise to help you get rich quick. If their only post invites you to go look at some pictures, run the other way fast and block them.
When you work to build relationships with others on Twitter and try to be a useful participant in the conversation, you’ll find a built-in audience for your next published work.
