Writing Workshop – Twitter Strategies for Longtail Book Marketing

I use twitter in a number of ways.  Again, as I’m using a pen name, I can set a theme for my twitter account. So most tweets and images have a loosely steampunkish feel to them, except for a few that are overtly about writing.  I even managed a steampunk theme for this twitter image.

When setting up your twitter profile, remember, you are not necessarily looking for like-minded people; you are looking for people who like what you are selling/promoting.  This is the place to set the tone for your niche/genre, because people are going to read this to decide whether they should follow you or not:  your profile is your first line of attack in targeting your audience.

Next, pay close attention to the photos attached to your tweets.  The quickest way to discover what someone is really about is to look at their photos, because these are the things they themselves have tweeted about.  If someone has followed me and all their photos are about cats, I might question whether anything of mine they retweet is going to have a very high impact amongst all that fluff.  Even on twitter pictures speak louder than words, so actively managing the photo content of your twitter account, to support your theme, is important.

Finally, set up an automated reply for anyone who follows you and offer them your best freebie.  I may be totally wrong about this, but it seems to me that if someone has taken the trouble to click on one of my tweets, check out my profile, and decide they want to follow me, then that is the point when they are most engaged with me or my novels.  So this is the point when I want to offer them a free gift.  I use a free ebook from my scifi series (not ideal when promoting a steampunk novel, but I will replace it with a free steampunk prequel novella as soon as it is completed).

I use a programme called Crowdfire for my auto-responder follow reply because… yeh, you guessed – it’s free, and it works well on my mobile.  This programme also enables me to unfollow anyone who does not follow me and weed out those who do not use their twitter accounts regularly – more about that later.

One of the things I really like about Twitter is I can easily use it on my mobile.  In fact nearly all my twittering is done via a mobile – either last thing at night or first thing in the morning, or during those unproductive few minutes when nothing else is happening.

When it comes to marketing your book, ignore whatever anyone says about Twitter being about social networking: Commercial twittering is a numbers a game.  It is all about finding  the highest number of like-minded followers – within Twitters rules, of course.

Finding followers on twitter is easy, but you may want to be selective about who you follow.  Here is my follow criteria:

I actively look for people who are: readers, writers (because they generally read a lot too), steampunkers, cosplayers, tea drinkers (often a code for an interest in steampunk and/or victoriana), whovians (fans of Dr Who), tinkerers, indie publishers; also those into: victoriana, cogs, gears, historical romance, anamie, comics, films, graphic novels.

I do not follow:  companies, company CEO’s (because they’re basically the same thing), accounts without a profile picture, accounts with no profile description, glamour, celebrities, and writers of erotica.  In addition, I always block porn accounts and accounts selling twitter followers.  Who you choose to follow says a lot about you and your product.  Again, your criteria should be based on your target audience.

Finding Followers

There are two main ways to find followers on twitter, a process commonly known as ‘farming':

The first method is to find someone selling books in your niche and/or genre, and follow their followers, applying your follow criteria.  Following someone on twitter is a bit like waving a flag and saying, ‘Here I am, come and have a look,’ they will either have a look and decide to follow you or not.

Initially, twitter limits the number of people you can follow to 2000, but also generally prevents you following 10% more than the number of people following you.  This means you somehow have to identify who, of the people you have followed, has not followed you back.  I use the same programme as I do for my automated follow replies, Crowdfire.  For free they identify people who have not followed you back and they allow you to delete up to 100 per day.  It also works well on my mobile.  Other providers offering a similar service are available – pick whichever suits you and your devices.

Now, no one wants to follow someone who is following masses more people than are following them (I know it’s hypercritical, because most people on twitter are out to get as many followers as possible, but that’s just human nature), so unfollow anyone who doesn’t follow you within a reasonable time (I allow a week).  This also ensures you have a good quality follower base, both for your own purposes and because, believe it or not, some of your followers with a similar interest will want to farm your followers, which is good because…

The second method of finding followers is to accept the suggestions made by twitter.  These suggestions are based on people who are followed by some of your other followers, people with a similar interest that you haven’t yet found.  If you are on a the mobile app, find the suggestion list with a ‘view more’ button, click it and you get to see the profiles of their followers.  On a pc there is only one suggestion list which has a ‘view all’ button at the top.

Again, apply your follow criteria.  In fact, for the best quality twitter suggestions, you should rigorously apply your follow criteria at all times and actively weed out non-followers and non-active accounts.  You will also become a quality source for like-minded people to farm your followers, but to do that they first have to follow you, giving you access to their followers.  Actively managing your follower base means the whole thing slowly builds like a pyramid of quality cross-referrals.  This is also why you should never buy twitter followers, because diluting the quality of your follower base will have long-term knock-on effects on quality.  You quickly get used to assessing the likely fit of someone’s followers to your criteria.  And, given the millions of people on twitter and the limits to your own time, you soon ditch anyone with a polluted follower base.

Generally, I provide a retweet for a retweet, and a favourite for a favourite.  This seems to suit the transactional nature of twitter without me getting too bogged down in personal conversations (I have these too, but not in anything like the numbers required to build a marketing base).

What to retweet or favourite from other people’s accounts often presents a problem.  I try to select stuff that is in keeping with the theme of my twitter account, but I am still surprised how difficult this can be sometimes.  If I have scrolled down a few times on a person’s account and still found nothing original from them, I automatically go to their photo section.  If they are promoting something or have any sort of purpose to their account, this is where you should find it (most people are promoting something, even if it is just their personal world-view or pictures of their cat).

So make sure you send out your best tweets with a picture attached, that way they will automatically end up in the photo file of your twitter account for your followers to re-tweet on your behalf.  However, every follower can only re-tweet or favourite each of your tweets once, so make sure there are enough original themes tweets in your photo file for your followers to re-tweet many times.  I find it amazing how even the most prolific of tweetwers shoot themselves in the foot by having only a few original tweets that I can easily access.

Lots of followers mean lots of people see my tweet, right?  Wrong.

This is the bit about twitter that is rarely mentioned:  just because you have 5,000 followers does not mean all 5,000 followers see your tweet.  Imagine one of your followers is standing beside a busy eight lane highway, the cars racing past are the tweets from all their followers.  Somewhere, in that mass of speeding vehicles, your lone tweet flashes past.  What are the chances of that follower seeing your tweet?  Probably not a lot.

Luckily, Twitter Analytics gives us some accurate data, if you are brave enough to look.  First the good news:  your 5,000 followers gives you a reach of 90,000 twitter accounts, also, your three tweets per day were viewed a total of 20,000 times in a twenty-eight day period – sounds impressive doesn’t it?

Now the bad news:  the statistics per tweet are vanishingly small.  In fact, the figures are so depressing that I have hidden them on a separate page – you can link to them here if you must.  But you really, really, really don’t want to.

To save your sanity, the conclusions from the math are these.  To sell anything other than a handful of books, you must:

Have a good themed website to engage you potential readers.
Tweet about the articles/themes on your website.
Tweet regularly.
Never stop accumulating twitter followers – aim for 50,000 followers as a basic number.
Spend the majority of your valuable time writing more blockbusters, because in the long-term it is a better use of your resources.

Regular tweets.

To send regular tweets over a sustained period you need some sort of automation.  This is difficult, because Twitter don’t allow tweets to be automated.  Finding a free app that will automate tweets is even more difficult.

Hootsuit.com  and similar services, let you pre-schedule tweets, which is useful for an intense marketing campaign, like a book discount, where you want to send out an avalanche of tweets per day.  However, you have to set up each individual tweet separately, which even with cut-and-paste is tedious in the extreme.  This effectively limits the number of tweets you can send, which is exactly what Twitter desire.  Also, something to be aware of is that photo tweets from Hootsuite don’t go into your photo file.

A better solution for regular tweet activity, is to use Buffer which can also work off the chrome browser.  This lets me set up a total of ten tweets which are released at set times.  Ten doesn’t sound too many, but if I set it to send three tweets per day that is three days-worth of twitter marketing taken care off.  I find this number also creates a manageable response rate in the form of re-tweets, favorites, and follows, without detracting too much from my writing time.

However, the best bit about Buffer (apart from being free) is that when I want to set up new tweets, I just enter the analytics section, scroll through the sent tweets, and select which ten tweets I want to resend over the next few days.  Twenty or thirty quality tweets, that I can easily reset, is all I need to build relationships with my existing fans and attract new followers.

The Buffer app also works well with my mobile so I can complete the setup operation in a spare moment every three days or so.  I also tend to move the delivery times forward by an hour every time as this increases the chances of different followers seeing the next batch of tweets.  As an additional benefit, Buffer photo tweets also go into my twitter photo file so I always have a ready supply of quality tweets for my followers to re-tweet.

I find that Buffer makes it particularly easy for me to sustain low level (minimum) twitter marketing, on top of which I can build more intense marketing campaigns when I have the time and energy.  Or build personal relationships.

Twitter, combined with Buffer, may not sound like a formula for conquering the world, but it does drive a steady flow of readers to my website and meets my original five marketing aims:

Have a low impact on my writing time
Have low cost
Be Scalable
Be Sustainable
Have a low impact on the rest of my life

It also reinforces my marketing mantra:

Market slow; write fast.

It takes a long time to build a good follower base on twitter:  you can’t attract 50,000 followers overnight – think more in terms of a year or two to build your follower base.  Keep it steady, keep it sustainable, and keep on writing, so that when your follower base matures you will have a trilogy of novels to offer.

I hope you have found this article to be useful.  If you have other twitter marketing technique you would like to share, please leave detail in the comments section, because I would love to hear about them.

Next time, I will talk about how I use Wattpad, which is very different from Twitter.

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