9 Habits of Successful Writers on Twitter

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It’s all about easy ways to optimize your Twitter profile and your Tweets and using Twitter for social networking, marketing your book and your website / blog.
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1. Perfecting your Twitter name
Your bio, along with your name and @name, is searchable on Twitter. This means people can type into Twitter’s search engine and find you, without even having to type the account name. With your @name, try to get the actual name of your small publishing business. Keep it short to give tweeps more space to re-tweet your content or send a DM.
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2. Use 160 characters for your bio wisely
You have only 160 characters for your bio, so make sure your description is clear and concise. Your bio should read like an elevator pitch. The first third of your profile should contain keywords related to your books. Include specific keywords that define your books. Think about what keywords a potential customer or prospect would associate with your books or your publishing company. Which search terms would they use to find your website?
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3. Photo – Icon – Avatar, aka Logo
Your readers (and maybe future publishers) like to see the person behind the book. Invest a couple of dollars or more for a brilliant studio photo which you can use for years on all of your Social Media sites, website, blog, Amazon author page or submit to your publisher to use in your books. Publishing businesses use their logo and stick with it everywhere, to have brand consistency.
Avoid: Party images, pics taken with your phone or computer, landscapes, snapshots from your last vacation, images of your children, wedding photos, art work, dogs or cats, cartoon characters, half-nudes unless you write porno and any dark photos, that don’t reveal your face or photos taken from the side or from behind and show only your hair and no face. Never have a second person on your social media photo. You might be in love with your partner, but it is less than professional to show this off on Twitter.

Your Twitter photo
@DanielSharkov via Jeff Bullas’s Blog, shares 3 tips on your photo:

1. Make sure it’s a photo of “you”, that really shows the best of you
2. Make sure it’s big enough
3. Make sure your face is recognizable
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4. Start your tweets with an attention grabber
You have 140 characters for a reason – a tweet is supposed to be short and to the point! Start your tweets with something that will get attention. Be subtle about this, though. Don’t use capital letters to show your enthusiasm. Start a tweet with “New” or “Learn” to at least grab the reader’s attention to lead into what you are talking about.
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5. Increase the amount of followers:
Use the search function to find like-minded Tweeps, e.g. type: reading, book lovers, book worm,. avid reader etc.  You will want more readers than other writers as Twitter followers, right?  Type into the search function words with hash tags #amreading or #Goodreads. Check out suggestions: “Who to follow” on your left bar of your Twitter page.  As more followers you have, as more people read your messages, and as more Twitter followers you can invite as Goodreads friends.
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6. Hash Tags increases visibility
Using hash tags # is another way to connect to people with similar interests and to increase the visibility of your tweets. Add hash tags to your tweets and also create tweets based on hash tags that are popular on Twitter at the time (you can see these as “trends” on the left-hand side of your Twitter home page).
Include a hashtag or two in your posts to get better search results as well. To optimize your hashtag usage, search for the most used hashtags in your industry. Try going to search.twitter.com and entering the hashtag you’d like to include in your tweet to see if it’s being widely used. You can also go to hashtags.org to see what’s currently trending. Ask for re-tweets (but not too often) Studies showed that more then half of all Tweeps will re-tweet if you simply ask them to! More tips to tweet:
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• Tweet the latest news
• Pick the right time of day
• Leave room for a retweet
• Use top re-tweetable phrases
• Write a tempting headline
• Don’t make the tweet about you
• Pick the right day of the week, Monday & Friday
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7. Don’t buy followers. Ever!
These artificial followers (not real people, just virtual twitter accounts) will never re-tweet you or buy your book.

If you have anything like these numbers – you are in trouble:
268 TWEETS    2004 FOLLOWING    345 FOLLOWERS
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Un-follow people who haven’t followed you back after a while. This is especially important to avoid “follow limits”. The first limit at Twitter you might hit, is when you have followed 2,000 people. You won’t be able to follow any more until you have 2,000 followers. So remove your non-followers, using Manageflitter.com or Unfollow.com
However, don’t use their really annoying feature that tweets on your timeline: “Got 5 followers and 9 un-followers”. This is not only an absolutely useless tweet, but makes you at the same time a free advertiser for them!

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8. Get enough Twitter followers
Don’t be a Tweep with a pathetic following of less than 100 people. And don’t sign up with only one or two Social Media sites. Take advantage of the great possibilities of sharing among all these sites. It is almost the same “work” if you are on one site, compared to having a presence on six or eight sites through the help of plug-ins and sharing buttons, as outlined in former blog posts. So can visitors on your Goodreads page click on the Google+ or the Facebook icon and send a message about you and your book to thousands of their followers. Google+ then sends the message automatically to Twitter. To have lots of Twitter followers is also beneficial for your Goodreads presence, as you can transfer Twitter followers with one click over to Goodreads!
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9. Easy scheduling
Tweet consistently and tweet at least several times a day. Sign up with the free version of Hootsuite  It really saves a lot of time, helps you planning your tweets over the day (or days) and frees you time to really interact with your followers. It ensures your consistent presence on Twitter when you’re unable to tweet in person. Once you are familiar how it works and you have lots of followers, you might change to the professional version.
Timing of your tweets:  It seems Monday and Friday are the best days of the week, to get re-tweets. Tweet between 12 noon and 2 pm to get a maximum of re-tweets for your Twitter content. If you have a WordPress blog: Did you already install the “Re-tweet” button? Just found a site where they describe it, both, automatically or manually. Happy Tweeting!
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Read also:

How to Become a Star on Twitter

How to Get More Re-Tweets

How to Get More Followers on Your Social Media Sites

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