Referring to my debut post on this blog, I had 268 followers on Twitter at the beginning of 2016. I am now up to 333 followers as of May 9, 2016 (I am following 320, FYI). And I have not done any post boosts or advertising on Twitter as of today. I actually meant to try it out but I never got around to it :-[
I have to admit that many of these new followers are social media marketing people, and a few fellow authors. But they are organic followers, and I followed back a good number of them because they appear to be accounts I’d like to hear more from.
The one MAJOR thing that I did differently was actually posting more often! I may have mentioned the DrumUp app I downloaded a little while ago. I have to admit I don’t consistently use it every day, but with the ability to find content that I can tweet about dealing with subjects relevant to what I concentrate on has definitely boosted my visibility on Twitter.
This was not done with the cutesy hashtags like #motivationalmonday, #throwbackthursday, or even #amwriting (and not a single tweet, to my knowledge, had #DonaldTrump either…) I’m actually not even sure how much hashtags work on Twitter any more! I know they seem to have more impact in surprising places like Google+, and definitely are important on Instagram.
I have started up my account with Buffer. What is the difference between Buffer and DrumUp? It’s actually a big difference; on Buffer, you can schedule whatever kind of posts you want, including links to your own blog or landing pages, etc. With DrumUp, the power there is mostly the content curating. This is where to get the “other people’s content” part of your social media strategy. Buffer, however, takes a bit longer to set up every day, which is the price we pay for the flexibility. Frankly, I do not want to spend more than fifteen minutes a day with Twitter related business.
But here is the burning question that I’m sure the authors want to know most of all: does all this effort sell more books? The quick answer: possibly, but it takes time to build the momentum. Last week, I used Buffer to schedule a tweet reminding people that I have a permafree book on Amazon; two people clicked the link to Amazon, and I presume they downloaded the book. I’m setting out to beef up my mailing list, and I think I will use Buffer to tweet and tweet the link to the sign up page. I have nothing really to lose as long as I don’t make every tweet about my books.
I think Buffer is going to be excellent for tweeting book quotes and things like that, once I have them set up.
So these are my observations about building up my Twitter follower base.
SB James, Doing the Write Thing 