It took me a bit to get the hang of Twitter. Once I did that, I started discovering the wonderful writers’ community that lives within the Twitter-verse. Writers supporting and encouraging each other. Well, ideally, that’s what it is. Every basket has a few bad apples that can ruin things.
There are many things I’ve learned over the past while about being a writer on Twitter—from behaviours that make people unfollow some right quick to things that will help to boost your follow count.
I figured, there are a lot of writers that are just coming into Twitter or have been struggling to make heads or tails of it all. So, I compiled a brief list of the things I’ve learned about using the basics of using Twitter as a writer or author.
Interaction is Key
A lot of people will only follow those that interact with them. Let’s be honest, no one wants to follow someone who does nothing but shout into the void. It’s only entertaining if you’re funnier than fuck. However, even this can get boring if no one ever gets a real sense of who you are.
Now, I know a lot of us writer types are introverts. It can be hard to interact with people you don’t know yet. Believe me when I say, so long as you aren’t being negative or judgemental, people will welcome your conversation. Seriously, it’s not that scary. I promise.
So, talk to people, respond to tweets, and have some damned fun out there. Be the kind of person that you would want to follow.
Be Yourself—Positively
Speaking of interaction, I should also put this out there. As an author, you will become a public figure. That means you do need to start conducting yourself in a professional manner when in a public space if you plan on publishing one day. Part of this means not being excessively negative.
It’s okay to have a bad day and say, ‘Man, today bit the big one and I could use some positivity’. When I say, don’t be negative I mean, don’t bemoan how no one is interacting with you or spending your time focussing only on the negative things in your life.
Don’t stop being yourself but try to bring as much positivity as you can in your interactions. No one would ever expect you to be “on” 100% of the time. That’s a ridiculous expectation but do try to be as positive as you can be when you can be.
Think about it this way, do you want to always be interacting with someone who is consistently negative about everything around them?
Author Persona
This brings us to a short note on your author persona. It never hurts to develop your online persona as an author, but there are a few key things you need to keep in mind. First of all, if you are going to develop a persona, make sure it’s one that you can keep up with in person as well. With luck and hard work, there will be book signings and events in your future. People are going to meet you in the real world and that persona you’ve developed needs to translate well to these events.
For example, if you’re writing for children it might not be a good idea to cultivate a dark persona online since that isn’t going to present well to your readers. Keep that in mind as you move forward with your interactions.
Beyond the Notifications Tab
Once you do start interacting something interesting will happen. You are going to spend a lot more time staring at your notifications tab than your home tab. Mostly because you will want to keep up with the notifications of responses and likes of things you’ve tweeted or responded to. It could take a bit to get here but once you are, there are a few tips that might be able to help you.
First, likes are great, but you don’t need to see every notification about who liked what. Use the mentions tab to only see responses and mentions. Those are the ones that may require a response because, as I said above, interaction is one of the keys to being successful on Twitter. The second tip is to NOT spend all your time reading your notifications tab.
You will eventually reach a point where it feels like it’s the only thing you’re looking at. This is wonderful if you only ever want to interact with the same people. If you want to grow your followers and meet new people, you need to spend more time on your home tab. The home tab is where you end up finding new people to interact with and new things to respond to.
Even when those notifications seem overwhelming, do try to interact with more people than only the ones that respond to you. That is how you get to know new people, and if followers are important, it’s also how new people find you and vice-versa.
Follow-Backs
Speaking of following and followers we should probably talk about the sometimes controversial subject of the “follow-back”. There are a few schools of thoughts on writer twitter when it comes to following back the people who follow you. Some people will indiscriminately follow-back anyone who follows them. Some follow-back anyone who doesn’t look like a bot. Some, myself included, only follow back those who they have positive interactions with or have a profile that catches their interest.
Of course, there are those people who follow back almost no one. Don’t be one of those people.
How you choose to follow people is up to you. Don’t let people tell you that you’re doing it wrong because you don’t follow back everyone who follows you. However, one thing you should avoid doing is following someone and then unfollowing them after they’ve followed you. Not cool, dude. Not cool. It makes it look like you’re only trying to get followers and not actually be a part of the community.
Tag It
Hashtags are fun. There are a lot of fun hashtag games and what not for writers as well as general hashtags that a lot of writers use. If you really want to get involved in the writing community on Twitter you may notice a few interesting tags for that. Not all of them say #WritersCommunity. I am sad to report that there are a number of variations on this tag.
However, the point of this little bit isn’t to give you a full list of hashtags writers use, but to remind you to use them, look at them, search them on occasion. You never know what you might find of interest under certain hashtags. There are a ton of lists out there about hashtags for writers. I can tell you the ones I use most are the #writerslife and #WritingCommunity for many general posts where I am looking for interaction.
When I am talking about writing I will use genre hashtags (eg #ScienceFiction, #Fantasy, #horror). I will also use #amwriting, #amediting if I am talking about those activities in particular as well. There are many more out there and don’t be afraid to ask about hashtags when you see them, most people will be nice enough to tell you what they are all about
Marketing Do’s and Don’ts
Of course, if you are a published author, one of the things you are going to want to do is market your work. There are many ways to do this, but here are a few things to think about that will be likely to make your marketing attempts go a bit more smoothly (as in you are less likely to piss people off).
Auto DM’s are a definite no for many people. No one wants to follow someone and then suddenly get some direct message from this stranger trying to advertise their book. Automatic direct messages are generally frowned upon. A lot of people don’t even like receiving an unsolicited direct message period, let alone one plugging a book or service.
Something you should do is make sure that you do more than plug your book. As with the first point, interaction is key. People want to follow and talk to someone that they can relate to. If all you do is retweet things, or advertise your book, then there is a good chance that a lot of people won’t want to follow you. A good rule of thumb to follow is the 80/20 or 70/30 rule. That smaller percentage should be marketing and the rest should be more general, fun or whatever tweets that aren’t marketing your book or service.
And when you are marketing, do use those hashtags. It’ll give your book or service a bit more of a boost.
Mostly, the best thing you can do to boost your book on Twitter is to interact and be yourself. Play some the hashtag games, share snippets of your writing and have fun. People want to follow people, not advertisers.
Some Useful Tools to Know
Sometimes Twitter can be a bit overwhelming. You get tagged in something and so many people reply to it and you keep getting these notifications. Or you followed a writer that you like, but they occasionally retweet things that you’d rather not see. Often people will go straight for the block button to stop these things from happening, but there are other things you can do.
You can mute people. Muting means you still follow them, but you don’t see their posts in your timeline. You can turn off retweets for specific people by going to their profile and looking at your options there. You can mute certain words or hashtags or even certain kinds of accounts (like ones that were just created). Or even mute a conversation that has nothing to do with you anymore when it comes up in your notifications (which will be in what is currently the dropdown tab in the top right when in the notifications tab).
Use these filters and whatnot. Blocking people should only be done for someone that you really do not want to see and that you don’t want to be able to see you. Explore your settings for most of the muting and blocking of things.
Save your sanity and do what is right for you when it comes to these things.
Hopefully, some of what I’ve written here helps you better navigate Twitter as a writer. And please, of course, feel free to follow me on Twitter. I’m @canuckclick!
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