Twitter Tips & Guidelines for Authors
1. Make a permanent About page. Your Twitter bio can only include 160 characters. It’s not much room to tell your story or introduce people to all you offer so be sure you include the link to your About page in order to supplement your Twitter bio.
2. Display your Twitter handle in as many places as possible. Display links to your Twitter handle in your email signature, on your website/blog, your FB group page—everywhere. If you bring a sign-up sheet to events, be sure to add a column specifically for people to include their Twitter handles - if you don’t tell people to give it to you, they most likely won’t remember to do so!
3. Content ideas:
- Most important. Don’t just tweet about what you do - share news that is helpful to the type of people your book is trying to reach! So if you're a horror writer, blog about an upcoming horror convention.
- If there are groups/organization you are affiliated with and that you think would be of interest to your type of reader then tweet about their news!
- Be sure to follow groups and orgs with whom you are affiliated if they are on Twitter so that they know you’re giving them support and so that they can return the favor. It’s also good that people on Twitter can see that you are associated with organizations related to their interests.
- Try using RSS feeds (these are like news wires) to automatically post industry related tweets. You can find appropriate RSS feeds by going to places like New York Times’ site and seeing their RSS feed directory.
4. Participate in trending topics. Look for appropriate weekly chats/trending topics in the publishing community. If they’re a fit for you then join in on those chats using #_____. This way you have a chance of showing up when people are searching this particular topic.
5. Leave room for replies. Keep posts short if possible. This way you give people enough room to retweet you with a comment. (Your posts should leave enough room for RT @yourtwittername).
6. Choose the right people to follow. When you first start, you want to choose a handful of big organizations to start off with so that people can easily tell where your interests lie - and others copying that organization can easily find you as well. Then try following individuals with a lower number of followers because they will be more likely to follow you back.
7. Monitor New Follows. Make sure you are monitoring new followers. You may not want to reciprocally follow everyone who follows you, for example some people who follow you are just trolls like spammers. Either way it’s good to check out who’s following you so that you can follow back and in some cases send back custom thank-you messages for followers who are important like press. You could also look into using an auto responder that says thanks to everyone if you start getting too many followers to monitor.
8. Finding people to Follow. You can find people to follow by using one of the many free Twitter directory and Twitter management sites. Some will allow you to look up individual Twitter users by both interest and city. You can also find an organization which you believe is similar to yours, for example Random House, and then follow the people who follow them based on the thought their followers would be the type of people who might like to follow you.
9. Get help. If you find you don't have time to keep up with all of this take a look at services offered by SEO freelancers. The right freelancer can get you set up, launch your campaign, and educate you on how to maintain it going forward. Even if you're not a tech whiz it's great to understand the basics about this stuff and with all of the tools out there to help manage your Twitter account it's easy to take care of once you've had someone tackle the set up process!
