So last week we looked at what you need to do in order to create for yourself a good Twitter account. We saw that your avatar needs to look professional, that your bio should be interesting and as non-generic as possible, that your header should reflect your personality or the mood of your book, that the link you choose to include is extremely important, and that your Twitter handle shouldn’t look like a computer puked up a bunch of random letters and numbers.This week we’ll look at simple ways to get followers, and next week we’ll look at a more “industrialized” approach to the same principles we’ll learn here.
There are several different ways that you can get followers, all of which you should do when starting out:
- Allow Twitter to search through your email contacts and find all of your friends’ accounts. As soon as you do, follow all of these people as they’re folks who will support you and engage with you regularly.
- Follow everyone that follows the folks you followed in #1. Most likely, you’ll find tons of people you already know along with many with whom you have a lot of things in common.
- Since you have a common friend and, likely, common interests, these people are also likely to engage with you.Search for authors in your genre and follow the people who follow them. These people are in the genre in which your book falls, so they’ll probably be interested in your specific book.
- Follow people that tweet about the genre in which your book falls. Perhaps everyday you follow each person that used that hashtag #YA. That can be a great way to connect with active folks interested in your book.
The principle with these four points is that a large number of the people whom you follow on Twitter will eventually follow you back. Some won’t, and you unfollow them, but we’ll leave that for another portion of this series. Until then, happy following! We hope that these tips will help as you build your accounts!
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Christian Lee is SOOP’s social media manager and book publicist, as well as being the CEO of Basilica Press (now owned by Sage Ink, a new company of which he is part-owner, co-CEO and CMO). Christian is also the author of Sealed, a Top 20 Book Idea at www.SOOPLLC.com, whose writing style is greatly inspired by Dan Brown’s style in Angels and Demons.
I have found the easiest and most basic way to increase your Twitter is to FOLLOW BACK! I go every day to my list of followers and as long as the account does not have a distasteful avatar or profile, I follow back.