Social networks have been proven and widely adopted as mainstream forms of online marketing and communication. Authors are now using websites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to communicate with their audience, fellow authors, and other people in the publishing industry. Using Twitter for authors has significantly more benefits than using other social media websites. The following are the things authors can do to make Twitter work for them.

Choose a niche and stick to it: An author and his book are difficult to distinguish on social media because they are one and the same in terms of branding. An author cannot market his work and fail to market himself and vice versa. In the same way, it is a deadly sin for an author to distance himself from his niche. An author should have one niche and stick to it because changing niches means shedding a lot of followers that the author has spent a lot of effort to acquire. By sticking to one niche, an author will also avoid mixing followers from other niches so that he can have content relevant to his audience.

Tweet useful information regularly to grow followers: There is no shortcut to creating a high quality following on Twitter. You should make sure that you Tweet information that readers find useful. This information is easy to retweet and it can make your followers to attract more followers. The higher your retweet percentage, the faster the number of your followers will grow.

Find people to connect with using #tags: There are many #tags that writers use to group their discussions by topic. You should find some of the tags used by writers and start participating in the discussions and finding people that you should follow.

Attribute posts to other people: This is a great way to make your participation in social media recognized. By attributing posts to people, you get their attention and create better relationships with them. You also improve your ability to tweet links without getting blocked as a spammer. According to Twitter rules, if you tweet too many links without @ attribution, you are marked as a spammer.

Connect with bloggers in your niche: When you have been tweeting with other people for a while, you will create connections with them and you can tweet links, guest post on each other’s websites, and conduct interviews among other things. There are many people you meet on Twitter that can help you create amazing content such as blog posts and podcasts for your readers.

Spread tweets across time zones: Even though traditional media closes shop several hours during the day, the Internet never sleeps. It is a great tool for you to be able to reach audiences from all over the world. You should schedule tweets to be posted periodically even when you are asleep so as not to leave out people on the opposite side of the globe.

Back up tweets: Your audience wants to look at what you have been tweeting, particularly if you tweet links. Twitter is not so good at helping you manage your previous tweets so you should use third party services like Friendfeed to keep your tweets well organized and easy to refer to. Your audience can subscribe to your Friendfeed or any other service to see what you have been up to.