Does Twitter Help Your Marketing Strategy?

I’ve been a very bad Tweeter for most of my social media life. I signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, and Linked In years ago when I had just started writing. The only one I really ever kept up with was Facebook and not that faithfully. I focused more on my writing than on my social media presence.

This past summer I had two books release in a very short period of time: Beleaguered, the third of my medieval serial novel, and Time Enough to Love, the complete novel in print. I did big blog tours for both books, but I didn’t think there was enough publicity for them, and my budget after RWA was almost non-existent.

A writer friend of mine told me how she had thousands of followers tweeting and re-tweeting about her books, but she had to “work” at being a supportive tweeter. You had to thank people for following and re-tweeting and keep up with this religiously. I hadn’t had that much time to spend on Twitter, but it was summer, I was out of school, and I thought, “Okay. Let me experiment and see if it works for me.” This in spite of the fact that statistics seem to suggest that Facebook is a better deal to get authors’ work publicized.

So I started my Twitter Campaign. After almost 2 weeks I’ve doubled my followers and I’m getting lots of things I want re-tweeted. Has this turned into sales? I have no idea. I look at the chart KDP gives their indie authors and I might have seen a bump around the time I began my experiment, but there’s no hard and fast way to tell with certainty.

What I do know is that for just a little amount of time (I’ve been tweeting in-between classes and when I’m writing as well) my name, advertising for my books, and interesting facts about me (like my Outlander obsession) are being tweeted to thousands of people. And that simply can’t be a bad thing. I’ll keep you informed on my Twitter life and let you know if there is a definite jump in sales that can be attributed to Twitter.

What social media do you use? What works best for you?

Filed under: Craft, Jenna Jaxon