Twitter is a useful tool to promote books. It is an online social-networking service that enables users to broadcast and receive short 140-character messages called “tweets.” A tweet is instant and can contain text, photos and videos. Millions of tweets are shared in real time, every day. As with other social-networking services, you need to build up a list of followers. An easy and effective way of achieving that is to “follow” people who you would like to “follow” you.
Using hashtags # is a common practice in twitter. Hashtags assign a topic to a tweet and people follow them. You will find that people follow them. You can search #hashtags to see what is tweeted in that topic. Read more at https://support.twitter.com .
When it comes to the moment you can tweet something promotional there’s some important things you can do to ensure you get the desired response, and don’t annoy your followers.
Notes
- Include a hook early on. Your title alone is not a hook. Your tag line could be a source of inspiration or you could quote from a review you got. Without doubt, the stronger a hook is, the better the tweet is. There is a real art to getting tweet hooks right. Note the tweets that hook you and emulate them, but add your own twist. If you can’t think of a hook don’t tweet your book.
- Include a short link. Use Bitly.com or Bufferapp.com or one of the other services for creating short links. But please don’t link straight to an Amazon page without updating your Amazon page to the best it can be. A link to a blog page or review of your book is also good, as long as the post or page has prominent buy links for your book.
- Include a # tag such as #ebook, if it’s an ebook, or #crime, #mystery, #romance #literary #memoir etc. if you want to identify your work with a genre. Don’t use more than two in any one tweet.
- The only reason not to use a # tag is brevity. You’ll get more reads on your tweets if your whole tweet is less than 100 characters, so don’t overload your tweet with # tags.
- Include a picture to make your tweet more attractive. Tweets with images, which show on the Newsfeed, achieve a greater number of click-throughs. Don’t do it all the time, but this is a good way to vary your tweets.
- That’s the next point. Vary your tweets. Change the wording, the attached images and the links to keep things fresh for your followers.
- You can tweet your excitement about where you book has reached on the Kindle chart, a review you have received or some other good news. This is a form of hook. It is also genuine and likely to attract real interest. Also tag people you talk about in your posts. It helps people to discover your posts.
- Engage: Answer all comments and notifications. When possible, of course! I allocate 30 minutes at the start of the day for getting back to people.
- Tease. Ask if people know (Do you know…) or want to see or can guess…
- Tweet the same content again. It’s called Evergreen content.
- Text Source: http://publishing.about.com/
- Don’t overuse hashtags, focus on content.
- Facebook posts tend to be longer, meatier, and not suitable for auto-tweeting.
- Check before you send.