Twitter can be a very powerful tool for book authors who know how to wield it in the vast social media expanse. Let’s say you’ve just published a book and you have 1000 Twitter followers. You then put out a single Tweet about your book, together with a link on where to buy it and send it to all your followers. It triggers a chain reaction of Tweets and retweets and in a matter of minutes the message is sent to 8,000 people.

That could be the normal course of events in an ideal Twitter marketing setting but oftentimes in the real Twitter world, such shout outs fall on deaf ears. The problem is too many authors treat social media as blinking neon lights advertisement for their books. Twitter as a social media should be treated as such – social, personal and interactive. That’s why people usually give the cold-shoulder treatment to “Buy me!” sales pitches in Twitterverse.

But it’s understandable why writers do this. It might be that they are trying an instant book sale formula that might work or maybe they misguidedly buy into an enduring social media marketing myth. Twitter could be the powerful tool they hope it will be, but not in ways they imagine it to be. What they are really trying to do is use tweets as megaphones to hawk their wares and are being ignored for the most part. To wield the potentially enormous power of the single tweet, you should connect and build relationships. It’s a far more effective way to attract attention to their published books. Here are the ways to maximize the power of a single tweet: Twitter and the author partnership.

Use Twitter at the top of the marketing funnel and not the bottom. You should realize by now that Twitter is not the greatest place to promote your books. But it is the ideal place to engage potential customers. Interact with them regularly and invite them to join your mailing list or visit your website instead of trying to sell them your book right away.

Use Twitter as part of a bigger marketing scheme. Plan a scheme to herd people from finding you on Twitter to your selling platform and then encourage them to buy your book.

Maintain relationships with the right Twitter followers. Getting 10 followers each with 1000 followers of their own is much easier than laboring to build your own 10,000 followers. You really have to focus on a small number of followers that are willing to promote you and your book. 

Join a writers group. There are various writers groups on Twitter that formed to support each other in the writing process, book marketing, and in professional roadblocks and rejections. They consist mostly of self-published multi-genre authors who rely on book publicity and marketing using various social media platforms.

Follow these Twitter marketing guidelines to get the most of the power of a single tweet and then you should be able to shore up your book sales.