One of my favorite social media platforms is Twitter.
Admittedly, until about a year ago, I didn’t pay much attention to Twitter. But with all the hoopla people were making about it around the time of the election, I became a huge Twitter Fan.
Advantages
One of the greatest advantages of Twitter is real time interaction. As an author, it’s essential to keep connected to your fan base.
Therein lies another advantage…fan bases. You can easily and quickly build real time fans.
Don’t have a fan base? Start today to connect with those who have an interest in what you write about. However, you need to stay connected.
Let your readers get to know you…the real you. The beauty of Twitter is you can post comments, quotes, memes and videos. This allows your Twitter followers to get to know more about who you are.
Here’s an excellent post about Fan Bases.
Mistakes to avoid
Avoid the mistake many authors make; only tweeting about your book or your blog posts.
Have you ever gone to a networking event, met someone new and all they did was talk about themselves? Or worse yet, all they wanted to do was immediately try to sell you something?
People avoid these types of individuals offline and on.
Your time on Twitter needs to include conversation, retweets, commenting on other people’s tweets and a small percentage of the time promoting your books and products.
If you’re the guy (or gal) who is one big promotion, people will avoid you.
Avoid automating everything
Automation has its advantages, but if every post is automated, you miss a lot of opportunity to comment real time. It’s important to engage with your Twitter connections.
A few of the quickest ways to engage with others is to thank them for retweeting your tweets (thus getting more visibility for your tweets), answering questions, posing questions, and retweeting their tweets.
Use Lists Effectively
A feature I love are Twitter Lists. Lists allow you to categorize the people you are interested in keeping connected with by reading their tweets, commenting on their stuff and sharing their information.
It’s powerful.
With lists it’s a lot easier to access the information you need to find with the endless stream of tweets.
If you have a book about health and nutrition you can easily create a list about people talking about health and nutrition, other health and nutrition authors, experts on the subject and podcast show hosts who feature health and nutrition experts.
Setting up your Lists
Not sure how to set up your lists. Click here to learn the step by step process.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists
Take time to play around on Twitter. If you’re like me, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how powerful this platform can be for authors, speakers, coaches and consultants.
Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/kathleengage