Twitter promotion: 7 quick tips for beginners
This post is about the things that will help you manage your Twitter account and see what results the time you spend on it brings. Of course, for some it's just about fun, but if you plan to create an account for supporting your author's platform, you should know that to get results there you'll have to learn how to do it right. Luckily, there are some tools that can help you with it. The rest depends on your content's quality and sheer luck.
About the content: everyone decides for themselves what they tweet, there are plenty of authors who only tweet promotions, and there are people who keep their accounts interesting and human. After some experimenting, I decided for myself that I don't want to spend my time spamming Twitter with my books, because it only brings random sales and mostly serves the purpose of raising awareness of your work. Besides, for any real results with that, you have to reach quite a huge audience, getting hundreds of impressions for 1 link click. I prefer to use a promotional service for that, and on my profile, I don't tweet about my book more often than once a day. Just to show you an example of the impact your tweet must make to get link clicks, here's a screenshot of one of my tweet's stats. (Keep in mind that it's a popular theme, not promotion, it's a fandom thing, and so on.) Don't expect readers to RT your promotions like that.
But this is just my opinion, no matter what your choice will be, these tips will help you at the start.
1. Use TweetDeck
I mentioned in this post that TweetDeck can help you save time. It's a free program that you can use to schedule your tweets, and they will be sent out even if the program isn't running. I use it for the tweets I plan for a week, and the rest (random things I want to share with my followers) I tweet any time I want. This way I know that no matter how busy I'll be, the important tweets will go out. Plus, I find it much easier to spend an hour once a week, setting it all up, and not spread myself too thin between all the platforms I use.
2. Use hashtags and mentions
To give your tweets a chance to be seen, you have to use hashtags. No matter if it's a promotional tweet or just something you'd like to share, add a couple of hashtags. If it's something popular, you can also mention some fanpage/fandom so they can retweet you (but first check if they RT in general).
3. Use hashtagify.me for choosing hashtags
This one is obvious - it's a site where you can search a hashtag and see if you should use it or maybe some other, more popular one.
4. Use Twitter analytics to keep track of your tweets' results
Knowing how your Twitter promotion goes will help you make the time you spend on it worth it. Track the results you get with every tweet and adapt your strategy based on this experience. Experiment with different hashtags, genre names, mentions. Check on Twitter analytics which tweets bring you more impressions and link clicks. For instance, I've noticed that tweets with the tag #review get much more attention than simple promotional tweets with #Kindle and #free #ebook.
5. Target your mass-following
I don't see anything bad in mass-following, except that it should be done right, otherwise it's just a waste of time. You have an interesting account? You follow people, offering them entertainment/useful information, and if they like you, they follow back. Don't unfollow those who followed you. Search a keyword you're interested in, follow at least 500, give them a week to follow back, then go to Unfollowspy and unfollow those who didn't. (You don't want people to see that you're following more than follow you.) From a thousand users, you'll get about 300 followers. But only if your profile is interesting and doesn't force anything on them.
6. Choose the right time
Just like with ebook promotion, there are more and less active days. Schedule all important tweets on Thu-Sat, 9am-14pm on PST. From my experience, this is the most active time both on Twitter and Tumblr.
7. Have fun!
Building a real, interested audience on Twitter or any social website is time-consuming, but it will help build interest to you and help you raise awareness of your work. Do analyze your results, but also, have fun with it, write what you think, share what you like, engage with people. There's nothing wrong in promoting something once in a while if the rest of the time you give people something interesting. Even more, if you tweet regularly, they'll remember you and pay more attention to your Twitter promotions. Be honest with them: if you write comedy, make your Twitter funny; if your audience consists of fangirls and fanboys - fangirl with them. Choose yourself an audience and stick with them, it will help your following grow eventually without any more mass-following.
Read another post about how to choose a Twitter promotion service that will bring results
