Social media really is the self-published author’s best friend when it comes to marketing and promoting their book. One of the obvious choices is Twitter.

So how do you best use Twitter to promote your work?

Firstly, you need to follow authors who are well established and preferably write within your chosen genre. So, for example, if you write historical romance find authors who write about historical romance. As well as being able to exchange ideas, you will be able to find more followers and potential readers through the people that they follow. Therefore this will help to promote your book.

What is more important, though, is that you follow readers and lovers of all things ‘books.’ Get talking about your favourite books and current books that are making a name for themselves; this will all help to broaden your range of followers.

More importantly, though, is that you need to interact with your followers. You need to comment on their tweets, retweet interesting things that they say or links that are posted. To use Twitter is to interact and if you remain stagnant then it is not worth using. You need to use Twitter to help promote your brand as an author, but it should be fun doing so.

What you should never do under any circumstances on Twitter is to directly market your book more than a few times a week. Followers will soon get tired if all they see are tweets about how amazing your book is and that they must buy it. This is not a good marketing technique. Tweet about similar interests and issues related to your book, post a blog that is linked to your book’s theme or issues, and yes, do promote free book giveaways, but do so occasionally.

Provide information, especially if you are a nonfiction author. You can post about recent developments and news worthy stories, be diverse and interesting.

One golden rule is that of unfollowing people who do not follow you back, say after a couple of weeks. If they are not interacting with you then there is very little point in them cluttering up your news feed, unless they are posting quality tweets which are of interest and are beneficial to you. Likewise, do not follow people who send out excessive and similar tweets and who try to spam their followers. Again this will just clog up your news feed and will not be of any benefit to you in promoting your book.

If you have a blog, you can post updates from it onto your Twitter feed and similarly it is also of benefit to share details of your author website when you update the information on it. Keeping your followers up to date is very much part of Twitter. Let your followers know about any new book releases or promotions and of any scheduled book blog tours that they can participate in.

Twitter is fun to use as well as being informative, so have a good time when promoting your book.