How to successfully use twitter as an author

It’s no secret that many authors successfully use Twitter to help promote their books to a wider audience, being global and easily accessible means that you have a very powerful tool at your fingertips and you can get started for free.

Here are our top ten tips on getting the most out of Twitter and making it work for you as an author.

1. Get set up - So, your first step in using Twitter will be to actually set up an account (if you haven’t one already), even if you have a personal Twitter account it’s still worth setting up a new one specifically for your book or under your writing name alone. If you do have another personal account, you can still have it live upon your smart phone or tablet and switch between the two.
2. First impressions – Once you have an account set up you need to ensure that it looks the part, selfies taken from the back of a phone as your banner may look great on a teenager’s page but for a professional author you need something better. To get some ideas it’s worthwhile to look at other author’s Twitter pages (preferably those in the best seller lists), from these pages you should get some inspiration for how yours could look. But in essence you should have an image of your book, it’s title, your name and a suitable background which keeps with the theme of the book itself. The same goes for your profile image, keep it professional and in keeping with the image of your book and you as a professional author (remember – First Impressions Count).
3. Be organized – There are plenty of services out their which can manage your Twitter account and your tweets for you, this means that every notification can be automatically replied too and your own tweets can be made before hand and sent out when you schedule them, but don’t forget, twitter shouldn’t be a chore, it should be fun and works better when you get involved.
4. Connect with people – Interacting with others on Twitter is the most enjoyable part of the service, you can make some great connections, learn lots, have fun and build followers too, but again, the main point is to get involved.
5. Use the # tag – This is a great way to become involved with a far bigger conversation, by adding this to your posts, your Tweets then have a far better chance of getting seen, you can also search for tags on subjects that you’d like to contribute to, this can help you connect to an even larger crowd.
6. Don’t spam – One of the worst things you can do as an author is to only post ads of your new book and nothing else, people soon get tired and will stop following you as a result, think of it as a conversation, would you chat to a friend only about your book? Post elements which you find interesting and get involved with conversations in a constructive way.
7. Pace yourself – The likelihood is that you won’t have all day to spend on Twitter (and rightly so too), posting every thirty seconds is way too much for most, so keep it to several times a day.
8. Images – There is normally a high volume of traffic upon most Twitter feeds and the quick one line of text can soon be lost, so if you want the chances of your post being read include an image or a GIF.
9. URL length – Use a URL shortener when posting links in a Tweet, this will bring the size of the link down considerably and give you more room write. We tend to use McAfee for shortening our own posts and get on very well with it.
10. Run competitions – Get known by your followers as the author who does quirky things, give away t-shirts, pens, mugs etc. set competitions to get your followers to find out more about your book, it’s amazing just how much interest you can generate when you think and act a little outside of the box.