Social media can be wonderful, and I love certain parts of it. Sites like Facebook allow you to connect up with people you haven’t seen for years and often help you to stay on top of some of the stuff going on in their lives. It allows you to easily share pictures and events with friends and loved ones.

That’s a great part of social media.

Unfortunately, it can also be a real time stealer. It also seems to appeal to narcissists in a terrible way… a terrible, terrible way.

But… how can authors use social media well?

Over the next little bit, I want to post a few blogs on using social media as an author. These are far from exhaustive, but will hopefully give some tips and suggestions as well as give broad strokes on how you can use social media.

These blogs will be broken up into four posts:

1. Twitter and the Self-Publisher
2. Facebook and the Self-Publisher
3. Goodreads and the Self-Publisher
4. Other Social Media and the Self-Publisher

Most of the benefit of social media for publishing comes down to connections and relationships. Through social media, you can build relationships with people, have great conversations and promote your book. Some of you will be natural networkers in this sense because you are HUGE extroverts. This is beneficial because you can pass the word around to your friends and family and connections and encourage people to check out your book. If you are an introvert (like me), none of this will come naturally to you so you’ll likely have to work a little harder at it.

In this blog, we’ll look at Twitter!

Twitter

I set up a Twitter account years ago, but I could never see the need to Tweet. I figured… who wants to hear a one-liner from me? I’m neither particularly profound nor insightful. It’s bad enough suffering with those two deficiencies, but to display it for the world to see is far from ideal. There are enough people who do that. My gramma used to say, “Blessed is the man who has nothing to say and can’t be persuaded to say it.”

Twitter, however, is a huge way to connect yourself with your fans/followers. (On a side note, the term “followers” sounds cultish to me.)

With Twitter, you can tweet things about your latest blog, when your book is coming out and encourage people to rate your book (five stars, please). You can also keep up with other writers and learn what they have to say!

If you have a blog, you should connect your Twitter account to it so every blog post will show up as a Tweet to all your followers.

Here are a number of tips for using Twitter well.

1. Get lots of followers

There are three primary ways to get a lot of followers.

First, either be famous or infamous. I don’t think I need to say much more about that method. This is not something I personally have experience with so I’ll just leave it at that.

Second, follow lots of people. On Twitter, if you follow other people, they will often follow you back. It’s worth following a lot of people for this reason alone. You can gain hundreds (if not thousands) of followers with this method, and you’ll be surprised how many people you can connect with.

Third, tweet decent stuff. Tweet a lot of jokes, worthwhile memes, quotes, etc. and people will begin to see the value in following you. Try not to have a Twitter account that is just telling people to buy your book, but offer something of value to them and people will follow your Twitter account!

2. Pay for Tweets to advertise your books

There are tons of options for this kind of thing, and they are available all around the world. Some of the more affordable ones can be found on fiverr.com. You can search for people who will advertise your book and pay as little as $5 for a series of tweets to go out.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a very effective way to go. Most of these places will boast that they will tweet it out to anywhere from 10,000 followers to 500,000 followers. You might think, “Wow! Half a million! If only 10% of that group bought my book, I’ll be all set!”

Let me give you a personal example. I keep trying all sorts of stuff out. One of the reasons I do this is because of this blog. I want to understand what works and what doesn’t. I tried some paid tweets (I didn’t spend too much), but I likely had book ads sent out to somewhere around 500,000 twitter followers. Some of the tweets went out multiple times over the course of a week! It was great!

The result? As best as I can figure, I didn’t sell even one book through those paid Tweets. 🙂

Personally, while this route is very attractive, I just don’t think it works for the most part. If you’re determined to try it, don’t spend too much. 🙂 Test the waters with more affordable tweets before spending more.

3. Connect up with other authors

There is a great deal of benefit in connecting with other authors.

You can be encouraged. You can encourage them.
You can support and help one another.
You can review their books, and they can review yours.
You can combine your book with theirs and sell it as a package (doing this can encourage their fans to check out your work and your fans to check out their work).

Keep an eye on who is following you and who you are following. If you see someone similar to you (matching your genre, values, goals, etc), try connecting up with them. Retweet their tweets and they can retweet yours. Build the relationship and support one another.

4. Tweet a lot

I’m not one to tweet all that often so I’m a bad example of tweeting a lot, but consider this:

If you tweet a lot of stuff, people will notice you more and they will become more and more familiar with you. You can actually get software that you can use to schedule your tweets to make this easier. It’s not a bad way to go if you want to be tweeting 10-15 times a day.

Personally, I don’t have that much to say (nor do people want to read that much from me), but if you want to be noticed on Twitter, Tweet a lot!

5. Adding Retweeters at the right time

There are a lot of people who will retweet your tweets. Many of them will retweet the last thing you tweeted when they follow you.

So, here’s what you do: when you have a particularly important tweet (for example, the day a new book launches), add a ton of followers and specifically search for people who say that they retweet. You might find you get a surprising amount of free promotion.

Two downsides to Twitter

Too many tweets to read

Here’s a reality about Twitter: since people follow literally thousands and thousands of other people, having lots of “followers” doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll actually have anyone who sees your tweets. What I mean is this: let’s say you have 10,000 Twitter followers. If they each follow 10,000 other people who are each posting one tweet a day (that’s 10,000 tweets daily showing up on their feed, in case the math was tricky), how many of those tweets do you think they’ll see?

You might find a lot of your tweets go unnoticed unless you have a lot of really loyal and faithful followers.

Unfollowers

When you’re building your list of Twitter followers, you will find a ton of people will follow you on Twitter. You may then follow them back, but unfortunately, when you follow them, they will “unfollow” you. It’s strange, but it happens. What this seems to be all about is they are trying to collect followers, without having too many people they are following. Confusing?
Twitter shows on your profile how many followers you have and how many you are following. If you are following 50,000 people, but only 2 people are following you, it kind of tells other people you are desperate. However, if you are following 2 people, but your list of followers are ever growing, it says you are popular and famous!

I believe this is why some people will follow you, but when you follow them back, they will unfollow you. It’s because they want to collect tons of followers, but want to have a small list of people they follow in order to give the illusion that they are famous and worth following. 🙂 Is that clear as mud?

So… keep it in mind. If you see your followers list growing smaller, it might be because people are doing that–they are only following you to get you to follow them back. Don’t be afraid to unfollow them. 🙂

So, there you have it. Some ideas to make use of Twitter as a Self-Publisher! Keep your eye out for the rest of the blogs in this series.

My Twitter account can be found at: @ShawnPBRobinson

NOTE: in the coming weeks, I hope to post an early copy of the official SPoaB Guide (Self-Publishing on a Budget Guide). It’ll be a free a walkthrough on how to Self-Publish from start to finish. Keep your eye out. My hope is that it’ll go up in its unfinished form by mid-August!

Shawn