Why Those Aspiring to Authorhood Should Tweet

Hi, this is Zarin, Jonene’s offspring. She wanted me to guest blog while she’s at her conference. I write a little myself and build websites for authors. I run a blog about web promotion, author sites, social media, etc at http://builtforauthors.com/blog

I decided to talk about a scary topic today: twitter. I know a big chunk of writers love to blog. Not as many have caught on twitter. Maybe the 140 character limit scares writers. Maybe it’s the word “tweet”.

Whatever the reason, here are 3 reasons why you’re missing out if you’re not on twitter:

#1 – Networking

Online presence is becoming more and more important in the writing industry. You expect an established author or agent to have website. Having a blog is starting to become and expectation as well. So it twitter. You’d be surprised how many authors, editors, agents and publishers are on twitter.

Neil Gaiman, for example has over 1,500,000 followers. That means 1.5 million people see every tweet he sends out. Unlike Facebook, you don’t have to wait for a “friend approval” in order to follow someone. Search for your favorite author or agent, and click “follow”. That’s it.

Twitter is an excellent tool for following trends and news in the industry as well as building helpful connections. The more industry professionals you follow, the more you’ll be in the know, and the more will follow you.

#2 – Quick and Easy

Blogging is awesome, but it’s also time consuming. Twitter on the other hand, takes just a couple minutes of your day. All you do go to twitter.com, type in your 140-character or shorter message, and that’s it!

#3 – Complements Blogging

It’s not one or the other—you should be blogging AND tweeting. Tweeting takes so little time, there’s no reason not to. When you have a new blog post, link to it on your twitter. This will increase your exposure and audience. There may be authors or agents that don’t follow your blog until they see a link to an interesting article on your twitter feed.

There are also ways to connect your blog to your twitter. You can add a twitter feed to the sidebar or footer of your blog to show live twitter updates (you can find twitter feed plugins to add it to your blog easily). You can also add “tweet” buttons to your blog posts so that other visitors can spread the word on their twitter page. You can get easy to use, copy-and-paste code for twitter buttons at http://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton.

The more exposure, the better. It’s a domino effect. Imagine if someone like Neil Gaiman tweets about your blog post—that means 1.5 million fresh literary eyes on your blog.

Whether you’re published or not, twitter is a useful tool for writers. When you are published, you’ll already have a following and twitter experience. For authors twitter is an awesome way to reach out to readers and promote their work.

So register, find professionals to follow, and try it out!

You can more of the basics about what twitter is and how to use it here: http://www.builtforauthors.com/blog/?p=75

And how to promote your twitter page here: http://www.builtforauthors.com/blog/?p=96