SPoaB Guide: A Free Self-Publishing on a Budget Guide

Social Media and the Self-Publisher: Twitter

Social media can be wonderful, and I love certain parts of it. Sites like Facebook allow you to connect up with people you haven't seen for years and often help you to stay on top of some of the stuff going on in their lives. It allows you to easily share pictures and events with friends and loved ones.

That's a great part of social media.

Unfortunately, it can also be a real time stealer. It also seems to appeal to narcissists in a terrible way... a terrible, terrible way.

But... how can authors use social mediawell?

Over the next little bit, I want to post a few blogs on using social media as an author. These are far from exhaustive, but will hopefully give some tips and suggestions as well as give broad strokes on how you can use social media.

These blogs will be broken up into four posts:

1. Twitter and the Self-Publisher
2. Facebook and the Self-Publisher
3. Goodreads and the Self-Publisher
4. Other Social Media and the Self-Publisher

Most of the benefit of social media for publishing comes down to connections and relationships. Through social media, you can build relationships with people, have great conversations and promote your book. Some of you will be natural networkers in this sense because you are HUGE extroverts. This is beneficial because you can pass the word around to your friends and family and connections and encourage people to check out your book. If you are an introvert (like me), none of this will come naturally to you so you'll likely have to work a little harder at it.

In this blog, we'll look at Twitter!

Twitter

I set up a Twitter account years ago, but I could never see the need to Tweet. I figured... who wants to hear a one-liner from me? I'm neither particularly profound nor insightful. It's bad enough suffering with those two deficiencies, but to display it for the world to see is far from ideal. There are enough people who do that. My gramma used to say, "Blessed is the man who has nothing to say and can't be persuaded to say it."

Twitter, however, is a huge way to connect yourself with your fans/followers. (On a side note, the term "followers" sounds cultish to me.)

With Twitter, you can tweet things about your latest blog, when your book is coming out and encourage people to rate your book (five stars, please). You can also keep up with other writers and learn what they have to say!

If you have a blog, you should connect your Twitter account to it so every blog post will show up as a Tweet to all your followers.

Here are a number of tips for usingTwitter well.1. Get lots of followers

There are three primary ways to get a lot of followers.

First, either be famous or infamous. I don't think I need to say much more about that method. This is not something I personally have experience with so I'll just leave it at that.

Second, follow lots of people. On Twitter, if you follow other people, they will often follow you back. It's worth following a lot of people for this reason alone. You can gain hundreds (if not thousands) of followers with this method, and you'll be surprised how many people you can connect with.

Third, tweet decent stuff. Tweet a lot of jokes, worthwhile memes, quotes, etc. and people will begin to see the value in following you. Try not to have a Twitter account that is just telling people to buy your book, but offer something of value to them and people will follow your Twitter account!

2. Pay for Tweets to advertise yourbooks

There are tons of options for this kind of thing, and they are available all around the world. Some of the more affordable ones can be found on fiverr.com. You can search for people who will advertise your book and pay as little as $5 for a series of tweets to go out.