What is the best way for authors to promote themselves on Twitter

Originally answered on Quora

By adding value to the conversation

If you’re just posting links to sites where people can buy your books you’re not really going to grow. What you need to do is start adding value to the community.

tHow?

Well, there are a few ways you can do this. The most important thing is listening and actively joining conversations where your voice is a benefit. These could be conversations about you, your books, your genre, authors in general etc.

Start networking with other authors who would (hopefully) become friends and say how wonderful your work is. Connections are important and they have to be earned through continued engaging on Twitter.

Simply liking tweets isn’t enough. You’ve got to get in those replies if you’re looking to promote for free.

t What about Twitter Chats?

I’m actually in #indieauthorchat — although I skipped today — and that’s a great place for authors to come together. It’s a small but active community that meets every week. Twitter chats are a great place to start — you may have one specifically for your genre — you can always make one yourself!

They also make it easy to find other authors as they’re right in the chat. No need to be searching around Twitter if they’re right there.

So about these other authors then…

This depends on how competitive you are. If you’re nice and looking for long-term friends then you want to start building relationships with people which will help you promote your stuff for free.

However, if you’re competitive then you may want to consider other methods on how to promote yourself. If you find that a rival author is doing well, consider talking to their engaged followers (you could put them in a private Twitter list) and try to get in early.

And then there are questions

If someone asks a question (could be to another author or just Twitter) be straight in with the answer. Even if it’s not addressed to you (unless it’s a specific question that can only be answered by the person @ed)

Questions are a great way of getting personal and giving you some content to produce. It’s also a way of promoting yourself if you’re seen to be doing something active in the community — that’s totally for free.

High-quality content is a must

Your content can’t be all links. You could pick quotes from your book or what the writing life is like. Behind the scenes, content does great — as does murmurings and snapshots of your life.

If you look at your analytics you’ll be able to see a tab that shows you the performance of your tweets. Look at the ones that do well and see if you can produce more of that content.

And finally hashtags

Hashtags are a great way of getting involved and promoting yourself. #amwriting and #writingcommunity are favourites but there are genre-specific ones as well.

What you’ll find with writing hashtags is that there is an engaged community on them. There are people who drift in and out may be using it on a couple of tweets and then there are others that post all the time on them.

These are the people you want to talk to. Hashtags give you the largest community on Twitter and if you can become an active member that shows up time and time again on large hashtags that get high amounts of traffic that gives you a huge platform to promote on.

But there’s one thing before you do any of this promotion stuff

You need to add value. You need to give back to the community. Promotion (unless you buy ads) is earned.