It is important for writers to reach out to the right people; publishers and potential readers. Social media is a brilliant way of doing that. Having your own social media accounts will help you to connect with people easier and faster. Social media helps you spread the word, efficiently. Twitter is an online social networking website through which you can ‘tweet’ short messages out to people, or just in general. You can share information and learn from other people’s tweets.
But it is important to create a proper Twitter profile before that. Don’t think you will just put in your name, your picture, an email id, and people will even remotely bother about you – they will not. In order to make Twitter work for you, you need to work for it too. In the Twitter world you have got no ‘Friends’, but ‘Followers’. And it is through these followers that you need to reach out to the right people. There are things that you need to do for that. I will help you by telling you five sure fire ways to get more followers on Twitter, followers that really matter.
Profile
Give hints right in your Twitter handle. Include keywords about what you do right there. Make sure you have a good, frontal face and well lit photograph of yourself as your profile picture. Write a good bio. Keep it short but straightforward. Twitter now allows you to customize your header image. Make sure it is something that goes with you as a person and your profession.
Connecting with people
Influencers are people with a large number of followers and who also follow other influential people. They have already built a good reputation for themselves on Twitter. If you follow these influencers, you will be able to instantly access his or her followers, the minute you tweet something to them. You just need to find the right influencers related to your interest. For that there are various tools like Little Bird, Followerwonk etc. These tools will help you locate the influencers relevant to you, either in terms of skills or keywords.
Share and retweet
Once you register on Twitter, it is important that you keep your account active. And not just by mindless tweets about what you ate during the day. You need to share relevant articles and retweet the tweets of others. This will in turn earn you retweets from those people, when you share something. You can also ask for retweets from your followers; but go a little easy on that – don’t overdo it.
Connect to your blog
As a writer, you need to maintain a blog online. This is one place where you can share your writings. This will be your portfolio (sort of) for Twitter. Every time you post something new on your blog, do not forget to Tweet the link. Do not forget to tag your influencers especially for these posts. You can also have the ‘Follow Me’ Twitter button embedded in your blog. That way, people who actually are interested and read your stuff will be on your follower list.
Hashtags and keywords
Use hashtags carefully. Hashtags are important in order to be more visible to people. Check daily, trending hashtags and make a couple of tweets about them. Also, Twitter has something called keyword search. Include keywords in your profile relevant to your interest that would help your profile come up in the search results. For example if you are a ‘writer’ ‘from India’, mention those words in your profile.
Image credit: Garrett Heath on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/215888_10150217537488939_1231540_n.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Abhinanda Banerjee is a full-time freelance writer and stage actor. She’s an avid reader, culinary enthusiast, and lover of everything about the sixties.
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