Twitter Marketing Tips for Authors

Twitter Marketing Tips for Authors
by Veronica Yager

Twitter is a fast growing social networking tool and a microblogging service. There are over 1 million Twitter accounts being created daily! Who doesn’t want a piece of that pie? Twitter enables you to send tiny little blurbs about anything, using no more than 140 characters. You can send out a blurt (aka tweet) about your day, what you are eating, or a new book your reading or writing. Anything you can think of, you can pretty much say. Twitter can be a great self-promotion tool, if used wisely.

When marketing yourself and your book online, Twitter would be a great addition to your marketing arsenal. With over 465 million Twitter users, Twitter is a must for marketers. I have outlined some core tips for how to market with Twitter. These tips are not limited to the categories below, but they will get your brain thinking about other ways that Twitter can help you market yourself as an author, or your book:

As an Author: Let your potential readers learn about you, and who you are as a person. Try to stick clear of politics, but if certain causes are very important to you, as long as you know you may lose a following or two, go for it. People want to feel like they know you. If you can engage with them on a personal level, they will want to help support you by buying your book. How do you engage with them? If they send out a tweet that they just had the best tasting burger ever, ask where they ate it, and tell them where you like to get your burger. If they just read John Grisham’s latest novel, ask what they thought of it, and what their favorite part was. They’ll start to engage with you as well on your general tweets!

Your Book: I recommend creating a Twitter account under your name as an Author. You don’t want to have to create a new account with each book you publish, plus your followers won’t keep following all the accounts you register for each book. Keep it simple! Remember to keep your tweets at 80% Personal, and 20% Business. Once a week tweet about your book, maybe a sentence or two excerpt, or about the book award you just won, or even sales and deals. Offering coupons? Tweet them!

Blog: Tweet a link to your latest blog posts for more exposure. You are sure to attract new readers! Use an URL shortener to fit your long URLs in without exceeding your character limits.

Stuck on what to tweet? Share ideas, ask questions of your followers, share interesting resources! Tweets most likely to be re-tweeted are photos, quotes and questions. Have fun with Twitter. Also be sure to put your website or blog link on your profile page.

Like the idea of marketing with Twitter, but still want more ways to drive traffic to your blog or website? Subscribe to my newsletter. Once a month I send out a newsletter – Book Marketing 101 which is loaded with great publicity and marketing tips, along with free resources for authors and publishers.