I know that different people excel with different social media platforms. However, if you’re a writer and have wanted to take advantage of Twitter for marketing your work, I thought I would share some of my personal tricks on how I continue to increase my following and engagement on the platform.

Engagement

The key to Twitter success is in engagement. If you want others to follow and interact with you on Twitter, you need to go out there and interact with them, especially when you’re new and unknown on the platform. If you just join and start tweeting, no one will take notice of you. So, how do you engage?

  1. Search Twitter and find people within your genre and start following them.
  2. Interact with the people you follow. Reply to their tweets. Like and retweet them.
    • One caveat here is don’t just retweet and like *everything* … be selective. Choose tweets that resonate with you to reply to or retweet. Like tweets only if you truly do like them. Don’t just spam likes in the hopes of gaining attention more quickly.
  3. Participate in hashtag events (more on hashtags in the next section). These are events focused on a specific hashtag where you can participate in and discuss the current piece of writing you’re working on. Drawing attention to your work even before it’s published can help boost initial sales.
  4. Make sure to give your followers a shout out and thank them for their support, usually in regular intervals (a popular way to do this is through Follow Fridays, accompanied by the #FF hashtag).

Hashtags and Communities

The main way to find content on Twitter is through the use of hashtags, and many communities have been formed around various hashtags. The writing community is no different. There are numerous hashtags related to writing that help bring writers together on Twitter, both in general and within specific genres. As I mentioned previously, there are hashtag events that occur regularly. Some allow you to pitch your completed novel to any agency that may be following pitches that day. Others give you anywhere from a day to an entire month to discuss your current work-in-progress (WIP). The trick is to discover events relevant to your genre and current stage in your writing, and then dive in and participate.

Here is a list of some of the writing related hashtags I personally participate in. It just takes some time using the search function to find others.

  • #WritingCommunity
  • #amwriting
  • #amwritingromance
  • #amediting
  • #MMRomance
  • #GayRomance

Paid Advertising

I have tried using Twitter’s paid advertising service. I don’t recommend it. For the money I spent on one campaign, I did get a boost in terms of how many eyeballs saw the advertised tweet (this is called impressions), but it did not increase engagement whatsoever. In terms of generating actual sales, I’ve had the most success with paid ads through Amazon, however even in that case I spent 2-3 times the amount I made in sales. There are a lot of factors involved in that, and something I may touch on in the future.

If you have any questions or would like me to delve into more detail on these points, leave a comment.

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