Advanced Twitter Strategies for Authors

Those who tweet on a regular basis also tend to have more followers.

But the skill in not turning followers into unfollowers is all about what you tweet. It is important to ensure you don't just tweet promotional material...otherwise known as spamming.

There are quite a few authors I've noticed on Twitter who make this mistake. One of them is the author of a political thriller who, since joining Twitter in November 2011, has tweeted a whopping 161,000 times! Doing this he has amassed over 151,000 followers. He follows 163,000 people. And if you look at his Twitter feed, nearly everything he tweets is repetitive promotional noise, mostly with links to Amazon. In an attempt to diffuse his overt promotional activity he has sporadic Twitter sessions where he retweets whatever is lucky enough to be in his timeline at the time. But, despite this author being a major spammer, his numbers still sound impressive. Perhaps, after all, it is possible just to tweet promotional material and become successful?

Well, if you follow any of his hyperlinks, which all lead to his novel on Amazon, you will discover a book that has a very poor cover design. Prominently placed at the top of the cover are the words, "New Edition", a big no-no for fiction. This screams out that the book must have been poorly edited when it was first launched in order for the author to now declare it's a new edition. And the most helpful reader review on Amazon, the first one listed, points out that the original edition has many errors and spelling mistakes. In fact, for a book by an author with so many Twitter followers, it is surprising that his book only has 24 reviews on Amazon, averaging 4.0 stars. His Kindle ranking indicates that he makes an average of 1 sale per day. Perhaps without his Twitter strategy, his sales would be closer to 0 per day? Who knows.

Anyway, this author is a spammer. I follow him and he follows me. I don't care that he spams because I rarely look at my native Twitter stream. As I follow thousands of people, it's impossible for me to read it all. I sometimes glance at a snapshot in time of it and, quite often, this author is there, which is why I've noticed him. Most Twitter users, especially those who follow a lot of people, can't keep up with their native Twitter stream and only dip in and out occasionally. Which means spamming, for them, becomes less of a crime. And the reason he has over 151,000 followers probably relates to this fact. But anyone who uses Twitter to keep in touch with friends and family, and follows less than fifty people would see their Twitter stream totally dominated by this author, with the same repetitive tweets. They would quickly unfollow him. He offers no added value. 

For me, the fact that he sporadically retweets others is at least one redeeming factor. Because of his large following, any retweet he makes has massive potential reach.

So yes, it is vitally important to be very active on Twitter.

But it's just as important to be relevant.