I’ve spent six weeks building two Twitter accounts from scratch. By Tweeting dawn-to-midnight, I’ve attracted 2,418 followers to my personal essay blog page and 1,918 to my fiction author page. Of those, perhaps 25 percent are useful, loyal connections. Let’s do the math: forty-five days at fifteen hours each means 675-700 hours devoted to attracting some 1,075 possible readers. My book hasn’t been released yet so I can’t attest to the payoff, but I’ve learned a lot about marketing myself via Twitter. For the purpose of this blog, I will focus on just my author page.
General Overview
I opened the account @ccaune1 first thing on Saturday, October 10. (By the way, I recommend starting on weekdays, not weekends.) Within a week I had gained 1,000 followers. The next 500 came easily, but snagging the next 500 has proven a slog. Twitter has an algorithm that won’t let you follow more than 2,000 accounts until you’ve gained 2,000 followers of your own, plus it throttles you the closer you get to 2,000. (It reduces your feed, so you struggle to find unique followers to click.) Once you do reach this benchmark, however, people will start to follow you with minimal effort on your part. My objective was to create a fan base as quickly as possible, and then let the account coast while I got on with my life.
Your Home Page
The profile and banner pictures transmit information about you. Choose a good close up of yourself for the profile. As a prospective follower, I want to know who you are. The banner is a good tool that many people don’t even use. Images of book covers are hard to read at that scale, and they make me think you only care about sales. Think of a way to depict your author platform or theme. For your bio, don’t be cryptic or cute or else I will just scroll on by. Be you. Mine says,
Author of the upcoming Historical Fantasy novel THE ILL-KEPT OATH, set in 1820s England. Think manners and magic…Jane Austen meets Diana Gabaldon!
It’s loaded with keywords, and people often comment on it. Pin a tweet to the top. (Post the tweet, then click on the three dots at the bottom for a menu to pin it.) Mine says,
Find out what happens when 2 proper #Regency ladies get their hands on #magical talismans in THE ILL-KEPT OATH. Soon!
I also pasted a picture of a fashionable lady. The pinned post allows you to expand on your interests; in addition, many followers will happily retweet it for you.
Starting Out
Have a strategy in mind. Resist the temptation to click every link unless you don’t mind porn, clothing, and sunglasses cluttering your feed. Don’t hesitate to dump lousy followers. Before you reach 2,000 followers, you must be judicious about whom you follow. Choose people and groups who are most likely to follow you back. JK Rowling is never going to follow you back. Nor are agents, publishers, or celebrities. Wait to follow them later.
Still, you need interesting, retweetable content to share, so do follow resources that reflect your authorial interests. As a writer of historical fantasy, I follow and RT new and old photos, especially of Britain and Europe. I follow groups that post about TV shows like Outlander, Poldark, and Sherlock, plus I follow those shows’ giddy fans. (A Poldark actor follows me.) I follow period costumers, musicians, dancers, and historians. I RT writing tips. When possible, I drop hints about how a RT relates to my upcoming book.
[Photo of a period dress] “Josephine might find this dress too frilly, but Prudence would love it.”
[Photo of Marseille] “Mr. MacNeal spends a summer here trying to avoid being killed.”
By personalizing my RTs, I not only look like an expert, but I’m sharing other people’s content instead of offering pure ads. I look interesting, yet all I am doing is reading and commenting.
Mistakes Others Make
Most people stink at Tweeting. They post a URL with no explanation, or a cryptic one at best. I won’t click to an outside website unless I have a sense of its content. Sometimes it’s pretty good, so I RT with an additional blurb in my words. Sometimes it’s mediocre, so I merely click “favorite.” Be particular about your endorsements. Also, most people fail to post a descriptive photo, even when they have characters available. Use images whenever possible!
Mass RTing of books or services you know nothing about makes you look like a shill. I scroll right past these mass ads; the moment I pass the 2,000 benchmark, I intend to dump lots of these shillers. Marketing isn’t about who has the most followers, it’s about who has the best followers. Let your followers love you for your authenticity, ideally before you have anything ready to sell.
Attitude
Be natural. Never self-deprecate. Be confident about anything you RT, and don’t RT anything you can’t vouch for in some way. Find a niche. Maybe two. My two main fan bases are: 1) TV show fans who also love the series’ original books and 2) fans of British history.
Resist the urge to follow and retweet about politics and religion (unless your book is about those subjects). Or cats. Your purpose here is to project your author platform. Your followers may not agree with your views on such volatile subjects, so why drive them away?
Snaring Those Elusive Followers
Go ahead and click on everyone in the feed who seems a good match, but if they don’t follow back soon (2-3 days), open your follower list (or use an app), scroll to the bottom, and dump them. It’s like fishing—you cast out a net that holds one hundred and it comes back with only ten fish. These accounts are either dead or the user isn’t active enough to do you much good.
The “Who to Follow” list is frustrating and repetitive; it gets caught in algorithms. You follow one guy who happens to like pizza and suddenly every person in the list worships pizza. On the other hand, if you want to follow every fangirl of Outlander, you’re golden.
Use the search function at the top for keywords, but do so with caution. I searched “Jane Austen” and followed hundreds; most were inactive and I ended up having to unfollow. Hints: 1) the less people say about themselves in the profile, the less likely they’re active, and 2) look at their numbers! If they follow 2,000 but have much fewer followers, Twitter is blocking them from following you. If they follow 100 but have 300K followers, they will never follow you.
When people post “thank you” lists of new followers (a waste of time, in my opinion), click everyone there who looks like a good match.
Go to your followers list, click one follower who’s most similar to you, open his follower list, and poach all his best followers. Repeat.
Your RTs bring you unsolicited followers, which is another reason why you must RT good content. You don’t have to follow everyone back—many are salespeople or have no connection to your brand—but hey, they’re numbers. (I’ve gained ten followers in the time it’s taken me to write this blog.)
Housekeeping
Once you pass 2,000 followers, pop in every couple of days and spend an hour RTing stuff and posting new content, otherwise your audience will forget you. Keep making them care about you as a person, and by extension an author they can’t wait to read. I’ve had many people say they can’t wait to read my book, based solely on my pin and my authenticity.
Learn about and employ hashtags, but judiciously.
Conclusion
Remember: each tweet (besides the pin) lasts only a few minutes before it’s gone forever. Once you start promoting your book via Twitter, one ad per day will do you no good. Post one per hour at least, and be sure to intersperse them with lots of interesting non-promo retweets. Work-week, daytime hours are best traffic times, especially mid-morning. Don’t forget that European followers are retiring for bed as we sit down to supper.
Few people have the luxury to spend as much time as I did reaching 2,000 followers (twice) in only two weeks, but if you are active and diligent, you should be able to gain at least fifty followers every day. In a month or two, you will have a good Twitter fan base to work with.
More Twitter tips can be found here and here.
CC Aune’s fascination for history awakened in the stave church where her Norwegian great grandfather was baptized. Since then, she has wandered battlefields, graveyards, and abandoned cellar holes, listening for the footsteps of those who walked there before her. From the fog-shrouded moors of Yorkshire to the bluffs of the Upper Mississippi, landscapes whisper stories about the lives of her ancestors. Some of us, she believes, are born to one place, while others spend their lives seeking the crest of the next hill.
Find CC on Facebook and Twitter, and follow her blog.
Hello, CC,
You’ve provided a bunch of good tips for us. I’m just learning about twitter, and maybe I misunderstand something about it. You said that tweets last for only a short period of time; therefore, you want to tweet every hour. As a reader of tweets, I don’t want a tweet from you every hour. It makes my task of reading lots of tweets more difficult. I’m not going to follow someone who tweets that often. Also, I think the tweets exist until you delete them. They reside in a database for a long time, and readers will access them if they search the database with a keyword that is in your tweet. I just learned this recently, so I stand ready to be corrected. Twitter is a great platform; thanks for helping me understand it. – Dane
This is a good tip particularly to those new to the blogosphere.
Brief but very precise information… Thank you for sharing
this one. A must read post!
Great post.