Social Media Week: How to Make the Most Out of Twitter as a Writer
- Don’t follow wildly in the hopes that everyone will follow you back – target your followers. There are some great tools online – even just the advanced twitter search – to find people in your category and niche, and follow them. It’s likely they’ll follow back, and they might help grow your audience.
- YOU NEED A PROFILE PICTURE. People will think you’re spam if you keep the egg.
- YOU ALSO NEED A GOOD BIO. Keywords are very important here. You want it to be personal, maybe showing off some of your personality (quirky, dry humour, enthusiastic fangirl, business-focused, etc.). You’ve got a limited amount of characters to get across who you are and what you do. So use them wisely.
- AND, make sure that you link to your blog/website!
- Try and notice when your audience are online: if they’re mostly teenagers in the UK, then try putting out key Tweets after school, when kids will be coming home and checking their phones they’ve had to keep in their bag all day.
- Use some scheduling tools, like dlvr.it or Hootsuite – both free, online tools. Create content in advance and schedule it, especially during vacations and periods where you know you’ll be busy.
- PHOTOS. I’ve only just found this out myself, but apparently, Tweets with photos are waaaay more likely to be replied to, retweeted, favourites, links clicked on, than those without photos. Use free tools like Canva (by far the best I've found!) to create images for your posts that you can add to Twitter.
- UBER-IMPORTANT: if you have a post that you want to share, then you have to post a link with it!! If you want people to check out a new tag on your blog, add the link. You can shrink the link (Hootsuite lets you do this too) to conserve characters, but people are much more likely to go and look at the post if you give them the link RIGHT THERE for them to click on.
- INTERACT! Talk to other people, comment on their Tweets, favourite their Tweets, mention them if you find content you think they’ll appreciate – and don’t just push your own blog/books. Talk about other blogs you like, other authors you’re reading you think your readers would enjoy, even just a vine you like. You want to try and create some sense of community, and hopefully you also want to seem approachable on Twitter, too.
Those of you who’ve been keeping an eye on my Tumblr blog and my Twitter over the last month or so will know I’ve been doing a lot of research into using various social media products for business or just to promote your blog.
So, for those of you who are looking to grow your blog audience, or your readership, using Twitter, here are some of the tips I’ve picked up.
Hopefully, that will be enough to get you started if you’re a bit of a stranger to the Twittersphere and don’t really know what to do with Twitter. If you found this post helpful, I’d love to know!
Do you have any top tips for using Twitter? Let me know in the comments!
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