Since I mentioned that my sales seem related to my Twitter activity, I’ve been asked several times to write about my experience with Twitter, so here goes. I cannot claim to have studied Twitter and admittedly my Twitter knowledge can still be hit and miss, but these are my anecdotal views.
My main message upfront: It can be hard work but I found it very worthwhile and an important marketing tool.
Reluctantly, I joined twitter about 18 months ago and had humble beginnings. Like an enthusiastic lapdog, I immediately followed everyone who was remotely book related and soon the number of people I was following was 2000. However, Twitter has an in-built barrier and you need to have 1800 people following you before you can follow your 2001st, 2002nd etc. Twitter account.
Thanks to some friendly help from an author in the know, I learned that justunfollow.com (free software) helps you here. It gives you a list of people who you are following but who are not following you back. You can drop these people and find new accounts to follow, some of whom might actually follow you back. You repeat this process until you have a better following/followers ratio and can move forward past that 2000 barrier.
[After you break through the 2000 barrier you need to keep a +/- 10% ratio, i.e. 1800/2000 – 1890/2100 etc. so you are never quite home free]
Initially, I followed people who said avid reader, reviewer and bookworm, in their profile title or description. I also preferred private accounts rather than companies, and I checked out similar authors and began following their followers. The rationale being that if these people are interested in the genre and the type of books I write, then they might want to follow me. I do this on a daily basis and it takes about 5-10 minutes
.
To avoid Twitter’s suspension of accounts that show ‘aggressive following behaviour’, I follow less than 200 new accounts each day. Twitter is vague on their policy and some of my friends seem not to be affected whereas others get suspended for it really quickly. Information on the matter is muddy and the stories I have heard are often contradictory, so, after having been suspended twice for ‘aggressive following behaviour’, I am keeping a ‘lower profile’. Twitter now sells a service to ‘promote’ your account to gain followers, so we know why they are being ‘difficult’.
Every few days I use justunfollow.com to drop the accounts that did not show interest in following me back. It is useful not to do that daily since not every person is on Twitter every day and if you drop them too soon you might miss out on some good followers/future readers who would follow you back eventually.
I began to retweet other author’s tweets to make personal friends on Twitter rather than just gain an impressive number of followers. People get notifications that someone retweeted their tweet and some of them go to your profile to return the favour. Depending on how many followers they have, that can mean that your tweet is tweeted to a very large number of followers.
Tweet teams are very good for this. A group of twitter accounts unite and share each other’s tweets in a reciprocal system. You have to tweet usually one of their tweets that day and all of them will tweet one of yours. This way you share each other’s followers, multiplying the potential of recipients for your messages. Some participants in the tweet teams have 100 000+ followers, so despite the leg work it takes to send out all the tweets in a team it can be a very worthwhile task.
After I joined a few of these tweet teams my sales multiplied by a factor of ten. Admittedly, the sales were not great before I joined but they are pretty constant since.
The tweets you send are up to you but I have found pictures (be very careful with copyright!) and short statements seem to be most effective. Listing reviews and the high numbers of your 5* ratings may not impress a fellow tweeter (and potential reader) as much as you might think, but concise text that indicates what your book is about and why it is good, – imo- will create interest.
E.g. I write about WW2 in one of my books, Slovakia and survival. By using the keywords with a hashtag, i.e.
#ww2 #Slovakia #survival etc you might connect to readers who are searching for books with that subject and are doing a twitter search with that hashtag.
#Alzheimer’s #family #drama
As a reader I myself have picked books I heard about in tweets that indicated what the books were about. They used hashtags or easily identifiable information such as:
#Jersey and the #ChannelIslands during #WW2
#transvestite lover of the King #Asia
#Cinderella story with a #horror twist
Additionally, tweeting about others will improve your ‘street cred’ and likeability, and usually pays dividends. As a writer you are more interesting if you don’t just talk about or advertise yourself, but engage in discussion; if you are a reader, and which author doesn’t read, then you get additional kudos. When I tweeted the blog post I had written about my cover designer, I had one of the highest re-tweet count and unprecedented activity on that blog post, plus a little surge in sales for the book concerned, too. Besides, it feels good to be part of a community.
I schedule tweets about me and my friends weeks ahead with the commercial version of hootsuite (about $10 a month. You can schedule tweets with the free version or with tweetdeck but with the free versions you can’t bulkload your tweets and have more manual work to do for that).
I also programme roundteam (free) to pick up tweets of a certain type (users of a certain hashtag, #ww2 for example. I do that to get noticed by other tweeters and to entice some of them to return the favour);
I also manually interact on Twitter by picking random tweets for re-tweeting from accounts I would like to connect with.
The more followers you have, the more likely are people going to follow you back, so the initial hard work will pay dividends later.
Since I achieved 10,000 followers, my success in getting people to follow me back really picked up. I joined more tweet teams and so my daily ‘audience’ had reached solid regular figures. I estimate that through the tweet teams my tweets reach several 100,000 additional tweeters and potential readers.
When I had a free giveaway of my books, I tweeted regularly about it in all the tweet teams and re-tweeted tweets from accounts that seemed interested in free books and giveaways: the results were beyond what I had expected
I use tweepi, a program with free and premium versions, to help me
* follow someone’s followers,
* to unfollow people
* and to follow those accounts that found and followed me on their own accord. Those you do not want to lose, because they might unfollow you if you don’t return the favour.
Finally, some general points.
- Don’t expect immediate results. People need to read about you several times before they really notice you and are prepared to buy your book.
- My sales are significantly higher on days that I tweet and participate in tweet teams.
- Don’t take things personally. Because of automation tools some people unfollow you without a personal reason for it.
- Pin a tweet onto your home page. When people come to your twitter profile to reciprocate they are looking for one of your tweets. If you have pinned one they can use that instead of browsing through your feed which might be full tweets that you are tweeting for others.
- Don’t use the same url (i.e. link address) for a link as this may be flagged as spam by Twitter. Hootsuite and Google have url shorteners, which also help reduce the number of characters for those links in your tweet.
Find me on twitter
https://twitter.com/CFFBooks
https://twitter.com/WriterCFischer
https://twitter.com/ASMSG1
https://twitter.com/Kindle_history
Super helpful Christopher. I learned some great stuff here that I will use. Thank you! Sheri
I’m glad it helps. I’m still learning something new every day and to some this might be old news. Thanks a lot 🙂
Thank you!
I just followed you. Pleasure to connect in a new way!
Except your twitter address-:)
Thanks, just updated 🙂
😉
I just followed you back. ❤
Thanks Christopher, that was an easy to follow, very instructive Blog. I’ve never heard of Tweepi but might look to using it now.
Thanks David and I hope it helps 🙂
Thank you for this concise and helpful post! Definitely a huge help to me who is sporadic at best in my twittering!
This is really helpful, Thanks Christoph
Hi Christoph, Yep – a good ‘Twitter in a nutshell’ article. Thank you. There is always something to learn (and I did!) also good to know that I am on the right track in some aspects though, as always – well behind in progress compared to you!
Would you mind explaining your final general point a little more. You advise ‘Don’t use the same URL ‘ – I know how to make shortened links but not sure exactly what you mean they shouldn’t be the same as! Sorry if it is glaringly obvious! And, many thanks again.
Certainly:
URL: is something like this https://writerchristophfischer.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/my-five-cents-worth-on-getting-ahead-on-twitter or
http://www.amazon.com/Christoph-Fischer/e/B00CLO9VMQ
shortened it is something like this: http://ow.ly/BDzq8
Instead of using the same long or short version every day I use the same shortener to make a new one: http://ow.ly/BDzCh
Therefor Twitter doesn’t think I am spamming the same message all over
If you check, the last three links all get you to the same page
🙂
Thanks Christoph, I just need things spelling out at times! I’m going to put an extra effort into Twitter – thanks for clarifying and good luck with your new book!
Thank you 🙂 and like wise!
Thank you Christoph. As I am neither good in computers nor in maths, I had to read again. But, I am glad you posted this. It is a great help for writers like myself. I am sharing this. So good to have you here 🙂
Thank you. I hope it helps 🙂
I had no idea Twitter had tweet teams. I’ll check it out today. Do you just search #tweetteams?
I found them through FB groups, author groups or otherwise connected individuals who set them up. friend me on Facebook and I can introduce you
Very good and useful advice. I’m just now starting to implement some of these things, but one thing I couldn’t agree with more … make connections. I’ve made friends, all of which write different genres, but we all share each other’s work. It does help in sales and visibility.
I couldn’t agree more 🙂
Dear God, you are clever! I’m sure this makes perfect sense to tech savvy folks, but I fear I am hopeless. I don’t consider myself lazy, but my humble brain is just not constructed for such a juggling act. You have, however, given me an idea: perhaps I can find someone to manage this for me on commission?
A great idea. A Virtual Assistant would make all of our lives so much easier 🙂
They are around. I just need to seel more books so I can afford one 🙂
so by following this advice i added another 25% to my (admittedly initially low) number of followers in a matter of hours. your posting came at an auspicious time for me on the heels of a busy day with a few re-tweets by folks with large followings–a bit of name recognition must have helped when i sought out and followed users with a similar focus: writing. outstanding post worth re-visiting. -ben
Thanks for the info, Christopher. Although i didn’t do this for personal gain, one day i worked my behind off, re-blogging a series of interviews. My blog had a record number of views that day (though that’s still not much compared to others). Later i checked to see if it impacted book sales… and i hadn’t sold a single one…
Maybe i at least helped someone else sell theirs.
I’ll keep this in mind about Twitter. Thanks and hugs!
Thanks Teagan,
I am sure you’ll get plenty of good karma and sales are often delayed by a few days anyway. People need to hear your name a few times (7?) before they take you in properly, I have been told.
I wish you tons of sales and thanks for being such a great source of joy and happiness on the Internet 🙂
Great info Christopher, I’m always learning something new. I’ve just been told I can’t follow anymore as I reached the dreaded 2500 mark. Any suggestions?
Yes, get the free version of justunfollow or tweepi and drop some of the people who you are folowing but who are not following you back.
You can unfollow them, so you get a better follower/following ratio. If you are following 2500 people you have to have at least 2250 people follow you back. If you are at 2000, th enumber is 1800. So keep dropping people who are not following you back until the numbers are closer together.
I hope this helps 🙂
Reblogged this on Annie's Blog and commented:
I’m always looking for ways to help other authors as well as help myself. Christopher gives some great tricks for using twitter..
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Wow, so helpful! Thank you!
I’m so glad to hear it. Best of luck 🙂
Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog….. An Author Promotions Enterprise! and commented:
More Twitter info and advice 😀
Thanks for the reblog 🙂
Welcome Christoph 😀
I’m still learning about all the hashtag stuff and retweeting; #MRetweetTrain is good! Just started on twitter about 3 weeks ago and my blog followers have gone from 5 to 300. Thanks for all the info! I still have a lot to learn. One good thing I’ve learned if if you retweet something from somebody you aren’t following they will quite often follow you.
Yes, and if you pin a tweet to the top of your profile they will most likely re-tweet that, too.
Good advice! Thanks for posting. As a writer, I need all the help I can get 🙂
I’m glad you find it useful. Best of luck with the writing and twitter 🙂
Thank you for this informative post. I thank you too for your follow, but I’m sorry I don’t do twitter…. but others that follow me do. As a writer it is good to hear how writers are supporting one another. I know I’ve read books written by my fellow bloggers.
I’m very happy to help and to hear that this post has been useful.
And I’m very happy to have found your blog – I enjoy keeping up with the friendly blogging community. 🙂
Thanks for following my blog. I found this starts to make sense- up to now I have been a bull in the twittershop. I will have to return to it several times before I grasp how when you have ‘followers’ they actually know when you tweet! ‘Unfollowing’ seemed so savage but I must brace myself. Very much enjoy your interviews.
Thank you. It’s taken me a long time to get a bit of a handle on twitter and I’m still learning a lot.
Happy tweeting and blogging 🙂
Reblogged this on Silver Threading and commented:
Wow! Great advice! Thanks!
You’re most welcome. I hope it helps 🙂
Yes. I love Twitter but am still learning how to use it.
Very helpful! I have an account there, but rarely even log in. Mostly, I think I just didn’t understand how it works. Thanks!
Thank you and good luck to all with Twitter.
❤
Reblogged this on Author P.S. Bartlett.
Thanks for the re-blog 🙂
Thank you so much. I’m on twitter but had no idea how to build a following so I haven’t been posting very often and don’t have a very large audience. This was very helpful and I’m going to keep this info handy. You are now on my list of people to follow.
Thank you 🙂
This is all excellent info, though I don’t really want to make a science out of gaining followers. I guess I’m not in a big rush about it and it happens organically, which I prefer anyway. I didn’t know about the 10% ratio, so that’s very helpful, for sure! Thanks, Christoph and Colleen 🙂
Thank you. I’m so pleased it helps 🙂
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Super valuable info, I’m bookmarking. I’m kinda stuck at 1514 followers, and will follow your tips!
Thanks. I’m glad you find the information useful! Best of luck 🙂
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