Why choose Twitter as your primary social platform? Well, Twitter is the only platform where you can initiate a conversation with just about anybody within seconds, be it the POTUS or your long lost cousin (provided she’s on Twitter, of course). This inclusivity makes the social media platform an excellent place to build a loyal following.

As writers, you can not only attract your readers on Twitter, but also contact publishers, build powerful, beneficial relationships, and increase clout in your niche.

However, accomplishing these goals can be tough, especially if you have no experience in establishing a brand on social media. Here are seven easy to follow tips that can help you get it done.

1. Complete your profile

Begin with a current, relevant profile and cover pictures. Consider your cover picture to be your personal advertising space that you can use to express yourself and exhibit your talent. Add a Twitter bio identifying what you intend to share with followers, and a link to your website/LinkedIn page for credibility.

People are likely to follow and interact with users who appear trustworthy and interesting. Try to shape that perception with what you share on your profile.

2. Target your audience

Your followers are more likely to interact with your content if it’s relevant to them and their interests. Simply growing a large Twitter following is of no consequence, because it’s the engagement that ultimately matters. Social media is only a means for you to achieve goals, like traffic to your author website or an increase in number of book copies sold.

It’s important to be consistent and share posts related to your brand. Instead of creating posts and sharing them each day, you could create and schedule them in advance with a social media management tool like Drumup.

3. Be polite and helpful

You can call it quid pro quo or whatever you want, but few strategies work as effectively for social media engagement as continuously engaging with content shared by other people.

By sharing content of fans, experts in your niche and influencers, you get opportunities to build relationships with important people.

Additionally, it’s also important to acknowledge people who have shared your content or commented on it. If you can’t log in regularly, you can use a keyword monitoring solution like BrandWatch to alert you each time someone mentions you or your books on social media.

4. Initiate conversations

A great way to inspire loyalty is by making the first move, holding your hand out and giving the other person room to interact with you. Before you check notifications to see what people are saying to you, look at your home feed and try to reply to at least one person.

If you follow a lot of people, your home feed is probably a mess, with too much information for you to process. The simplest way to deal with that is by creating Twitter lists to manage conversations.

5. Acknowledge and respond to fans

When people do interact with your content, ensure that you acknowledge them for it. Invest in creating long, detailed and useful answers, presented in a visually appealing manner.

In fact, you could go all out and create a video response post. Contrary to what most people believe, video responses are easy to create. With apps like Periscope and Twitter now letting you shoot with your phone’s camera, responding with video can be a piece of cake.

6. Use cross-platform promotion

Why restrict yourself to Twitter, when you can build a following on multiple social network and funnel users from one to the other? Doing so would probably take more effort, but can help you reach audiences who aren’t active on Twitter.

You don’t have to restrict yourself to social media, you can support your efforts on it with email, your web presence and offline marketing. Many times, all of these media go hand in hand.

7. Show your personality

It may sound elementary, but personality is key on social media. That’s the reason why some Twitterati have overwhelming engagement on their pages, while others are merely a blip on Twitter’s massive existence.

Find a unique, relatable and entertaining voice, and consistently build on it via all your social media channels. Most of the posts that go viral have personality in them, incite powerful emotions and get people to act. Bear that in mind when creating your Twitter persona and posts.

In the end, your Twitter experience is only as effective or useful as the content you share on it and the personality you build using it. Focus on your content and consistency and you’ll be able to build a loyal Twitter following that counts.

Image credit: https://Pixabay.com

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