Expert: Phyllis Zimbler Miller
Twitter.com is an excellent free social media site on which to connect with potential fans of your book as well as learn from other book authors and publicity experts.
But – and this is a very important but – to benefit from Twitter requires understanding that you do NOT spend every tweet (140-character limit update) urging people to buy your book.
Instead you tweet information related to the subject of your nonfiction book or information related to your fiction book that your followers on Twitter will find of interest.
Let’s take two examples to make this clearer:
Imagine you’ve written a nonfiction book on nutrition for people over 65. You could then share nutrition information from other people’s blog posts, from government nutrition sites, and even recipes for nutritious food.
People interested in this information will likely follow you (note – these people are your book’s target market) and they will know that you’ve written a book on the subject because your 160-chracter limit Twitter bio will say this and your Twitter bio hot link will go to your book’s website or your book’s page on BookBuzzr.
Or perhaps you’ve written a fiction YA book whose teen protagonist has an eating disorder. Then you could tweet information on this subject. And again your Twitter bio would let people know about your fiction book.
Of course, if you have your own blog or write guest blog posts you can tweet the links to these posts. (Use a shortened URL service such as budurl.com or bit.ly to track how many people click through on your links.)
While many fiction authors believe they have a much harder time than nonfiction authors blogging or sharing information of interest to potential book fans, this isn’t necessarily so. For help on this you can download a free article at http://www.fictionmarketing.com/
One advantage of having your book on BookBuzzr is that you can use its BookTweeter service to share information about your book and how many people read it.
In addition, Twitter can be an excellent platform on which to conduct contests in order to get more attention for your Twitter account and your book. Author and book marketer Tony Eldridge has created an incredibly informative product – “Conducting Effective Twitter Contests” – that is now also available on Kindle. Learn more.
Although Twitter seems rather easy, there are unwritten etiquette rules that you should try to follow. One such rule is to tweet thanks to people who retweet your tweets. And if that tweet included a link, be sure to include the link in your thank-you tweet. Otherwise people who missed the original tweet and the retweet will be annoyed at not being able to check out what information is being mentioned.
For more information on effectively using Twitter, check out the ebook “The Wonderful World of Twitter and How It Can Help Promote Your Brand, Book, Cause, or Business”.
Bonus tip: On Twitter if you have the mindset of helping others instead of the mindset of promoting yourself you have a good chance of being the beneficiary of much goodwill. I am personally always grateful for this support – and I’d like to give a special thank-you to Freya.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) is the co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic. Read the company’s social media marketing blog.
Phyllis is also the author of the novel MRS. LIEUTENANT as well as the co-author of FOUR COMEDY SCREENPLAYS and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION.
