Twitter, or X as it’s now known, was once a flourishing mecca for authors. The site has greatly changed since Elon Musk took over but you can still build an audience from the platform.

NB. For those of us who have been around the block, we still refer to it as Twitter. Henceforth, it shall be referred to as Twitter in this post.

Before we dive in, remember the #1 rule - get people OFF social media and ONTO your email list such as Beehiiv. This is the platform I’ve used and do use to get clients to best-seller status - and I’m using it right now!

The aim is to use Twitter to drive people to your email list, not to sell books.

The sooner you get people onto your own email list, the sooner you own your audience and sell more books more quickly and repeatedly.

Here’s how to do it:

#1 Decide who you want to follow you

First things first.

Before you get started, you'll need to think about WHO you want your audience to be. The reason for this is because everything you do from this point onwards will be designed to attract those people.

Ask yourself the following question: What kind of reader do you want to attract to your Twitter profile and what would make them click ‘Follow’? Who will buy books from you?

Let’s say that you write romance. The romance genre is huge so making an impact on the romance charts is going to be a big ask, especially if you’re an indie author. If you don’t have a huge marketing budget behind you, you’re better off niching down and down again until you find a category (taking a look on Amazon will give you some ideas) that you can do well in or even dominate.

Niching down is especially effective when it comes to your writing so use the same principle when it comes to Twitter. It saves time and effort.

For example, instead of getting lost among the tens of thousands of general romance books, try niching down and down to a smaller category. For example:

Fiction>Romance>Enemies To Lovers

Ultimately, your niche should be focused on people seeking stories that feature Enemies to Lovers as their main plotline, the smallest end of the wedge.

What you are doing is effectively sifting the gold from the mud. You are cutting out all the readers you don’t need - and finding the ones that you do - the ones that will love your work and become a fan.

Once you’ve decided on your niche, I'll next show you how you can find these people on Twitter.

But before we go looking for them, we need to design a profile that will appeal to these readers – and that involves working on optimising your own Twitter profile.

You want your Twitter profile to catch the eye of your niche before you start interacting and getting new followers. You want to set up shop.

Here’s how you do it.

#2 Optimising your Twitter profile

Before you go trying to get followers, your profile is going to need to be in tip-top shape. It’s going to have to look professional, presentable at best. You have just one chance to make that all-important first impression. Remember, before anything, you’re looking to build trust. And as every new follower could be a potential reader, you’ll want to build trust with each and every one of them. You’re going to want to become an authority in your chosen niche. That takes time. But you need to start somewhere. Here are the aspects that you will need to be tip-top.

Twitter header

Check with the latest dimensions and use a header that represents the genre and the books that you write.

Use it as a billboard to promote your books if you have any. Bear in mind that your profile photo may obscure some areas of the header on some devices so do some testing to make sure that you're happy with everything.

Profile picture

I would use a picture of yourself. Logos or avatars tend to lose people and users don’t know what’s behind them. Be real. People like that and trust you more. If your logo is important to you, include it somewhere in your cover photo.

Bio

Make it simple and explain what kind of books you write and why you would appeal to the people you’d like following you. What will your ideal reader gain from following you? If you have anything to shout about (awards etc), add these in too as they're always a selling point.

Link

Use a link that people will find valuable. People often put their websites here but I recommend adding a link for people to subscribe to your email list instead.

Pinned tweet

You have the ability to pin any of your tweets to the top of your profile. This will stay just underneath your bio for as long as you keep it there (you can always unpin it if you want to update it). This is your opportunity to use a promotional tweet as an extension of your profile. It’ll be the first tweet that people see when they check you out.

I would highly recommend pinning a tweet that drives people to your email list.

A few other things

One aspect I was stuck on for quite a while was whether to promote myself as a brand of books or as an author. I’m not particularly fond of promoting myself (there’s that good old imposter syndrome kicking in) but what I’ve learned is that you can effectively do both. I would use a photo of you as a profile picture and a brand photo of your books as your cover photo. You essentially then become the face of your business and the two are interchangeable.

Now that you’ve got your profile primed and ready to show to the world, you’re going to need to do the next things consistently, preferably on a daily basis.

I’ll share them with you here:

#2 Content

Ask yourself the question: What kind of writer do I want to be known for on Twitter?

If you take a quick look around Twitter, everyone does their own thing. Those with a more specific niche tend to do better since they are able to zone out everyone that they don’t need to flourish. They don't waste time trying to please everyone – they are focused on keeping their audience happy. People are going to want to follow your Twitter account for a reason. They are either going to learn from you, be entertained by you or want to get to know you. They want to get value from you and to do this, you’re going to have to provide content and provide it continually. People are more likely to follow you if you’ve got good content and it needs to be consistent. It's that simple.

With that in mind, you’re going to want to create an ongoing output that will satisfy the kind of audience you want. Consistency is the key here. You will need to become part of people's everyday lives to the point where they'll notice if you're not there. I'll show you ways to maintain a consistent output of content shortly but before I do that, let's just take a look at what your actual content will consist of.

Firstly, consistent content doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to write original, lengthy blog posts on a daily basis. In fact, your content can come in several forms:

Your own blog posts (time-consuming but high quality and worth investing in if you want to draw people to your website and come across as an expert in your field)

Curated retweets from people you follow. Theoretically, this means that you don't even have to create any content – you simply redistribute ready-made content to your audience. The best way to do this is to create a Twitter list and then go through the list and retweet relevant posts.

Images/videos. These could for instance, just be inspirational or just for laughs. Remember to use the correct sizes/shapes and always be aware that you may be infringing someone else's copyright. Whatever they are, stay consistent with your niche.

All you need to really do online is present yourself as an expert in your niche. If you have interests but not much experience in a specific field, you can get along just as well by curating tweets and content from that niche and retweeting it. Think of yourself as a host of a channel, providing news, opinions and points of interest to those in your niche.

Possibly the biggest challenge then facing you is posting all this content. One of the most frustrating things about Twitter is the speed with which tweets head 'down the river.' You could spend hours creating and finetuning a wonderful blog post, only for you to tweet about it at the wrong time of day and worry that no one has actually seen it.

This is where your evergreen content comes into play. There will be content that will resonate no matter what time of year you post it. Even with the timely and topical stuff, be sure to post it several times before its timeliness runs out.

You can either schedule these in queues (I currently use you want, but you can do the same on Buffer/Hootsuite etc), but another content manager that has proved useful is Hypefury. There are other platforms that do similar things but the idea is to find a piece of software that recycles and reposts your evergreen content but I find Hypefury perfect for doing all the legwork and even cross-posting to other platforms. The less manual posting you can do, the more it will free you up to work on other areas.

Automating your evergreen content, therefore, forms a base layer of your output and it's one that once set up, you can focus on posting more timely and viral content.

When it comes to time-specific content, you'll most likely have to manually post this. There's no harm in posting the same tweet several times over in the course of a few days in case some of your audience missed it.

Also be aware that content with images tend to do better when it comes to engagement. If you're sharing a link, you may want to run it through the Twitter Card Validator. This is a web page where you can copy and paste the link that you're wanting to share. It'll then try and scrape an image from that page so that when you do share it on Twitter, it'll provide an accompanying image to go with the text. Alternatively, manually add an image to the tweet.

I use Hypefury to broadcast the bulk of my tweets on autopilot. You can find out more about Hypefury here.

Remember to keep the topic of your content as close to your audience as possible.

#3 Engagement

Now that you've got your output covered, it's time to work on another important aspect of Twitter - and that's engagement.

It could be tempting to leave your Twitter account on an automated loop of topical content. But the risk of that is that your audience is quickly going to get bored of seeing the same old stuff over and over again. They'll soon switch off and desert you. All your hard work will be for nothing.

Engagement is crucial in building your online audience for several reasons. Firstly, it shows that you are a real person, someone who is there in real-time and not just some robotic account that's pumping out tweets.

Secondly, it shows that you care enough about your audience to engage with them. Who doesn't love it when your favourite musician or comedian interacts with their audience during a performance?

Thirdly, taking the time to interact with members of your audience allows you to find out what their problems are, and allows you to fine-tune your products or services. You can learn from them just as much as they can learn from you.

Take a look at these stats:

These stats were taken from my Twitter Analytics account (you can get the same – just make sure you're logged into your Twitter account and then visit analytics.twitter.com). You’ll need to be on one of Twitter’s upgraded tiers to access this.

Over 4 million tweet impressions in one month – and that's not paying for any boosts or doing anything special. The difference is the engagement.

Here’s the thing with Twitter - the more you interact, the more your numbers will grow. This is because of the way the Twitter algorithm works. If you comment on someone else's tweet, that comment is public, and often shows up on other people's timelines. This causes others to get involved and the conversation spreads. People who have no idea that you exist suddenly know who you are. And because your Twitter profile is now geared towards capturing their attention, other users become aware of who you are and what you do.

So how do we drive up engagement?

One of the easiest ways is to ask questions in your tweets. Keep them specific to your niche and try and word them in ways that probably haven’t been done yet. People love talking about themselves so give them an opportunity to do that. One of my most engaging tweets read ‘Close your eyes and think of a childhood book. What do you see?‘ I could have asked ‘What was your favourite childhood book?’ but my guess is that it’s already been asked previously.

As a running joke, one of the popular questions I ask on my Twitter account is ‘Have you ever seen the movie Groundhog Day?‘, which I ask every few days. Those who are familiar with the joke think that they’re something special while those who are seeing the tweet for the first time usually respond with how good the film is. When they start seeing the tweet for the third or fourth time, they then convert into the ‘knowing’ crowd.

You can also increase your engagement with the use of images. If you are sharing links to Twitter, run the URL through the Twitter card validator. This should provide you with an image from the link and make your tweet look a lot more enticing.

Polls are often a surprisingly useful way of kicking off a conversation. Try and stick to your niche but you can dip into other areas every now and then to show your human side (eg. What soup shall I have today?)

Interacting with others' tweets is also a good way of 'introducing' yourself to others and as it's probably the first time that people get to meet you, you'll need to present yourself professionally.

Other helpful strategies

Hashtags

Synonymous with Twitter, a hashtag is simple a way of connecting relevant themes or ideas. Let's say that you're an author and want to connect with those in the field, you may want to include the hashtag #writingcommunity as an appendment at the end of your tweet.

The reason for this is that conversely, you can use the hashtag to seek out the themes and ideas you want to connect with. So if you do include the hashtag #writingcommunity in your tweet, another author out there in the Twitterverse may be searching that hashtag, and could come across your tweet.

Hashtags have extended to other platforms too and are useful when it comes to connecting with those in your chosen field. On Twitter especially, they are extremely useful at finding people to join your audience.

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are a useful tool, especially as your Twitter account grows. As Twitter is like a fast-flowing river, your feed can change within seconds. And if you’re following a lot of people, you're going to miss an awful lot.

You can add Tweeps (Twitter people) to your list by visiting their profile and using the button with the three little dots. Users will be informed that you have added them to your list so be sensible about what you call your list and how you use them.

Twitter etiquette

Maintaining trust and integrity is vital on Twitter and it’s easy to slip off the rails. Proceed carefully. Remember that apart from DMs, everything you post (or reply to) on Twitter is out in the public domain. Even with DMs, people can screenshot what you’ve sent them and post them so be careful.

Most of all, respect other people’s boundaries, their beliefs and their viewpoints. You’re not the only person on Twitter. These are real people (apart from the bots of course).

If you’re looking to use Twitter to sell books, don’t beg people to buy your product or service. Most people won’t buy books if they haven’t built up trust with you first. There’s nothing more off-putting than people pleading for others to buy their books. It reeks of desperation and people are going to be totally put off buying something that can’t be sold on its own merit.

Be careful with automated DMs too. Some pieces of software allow you to set up automated DMs that are triggered when for example, someone follows you. Often, these messages will involve someone asking for follows on other platforms or even to buy their products/services. In short, don’t do that. That’s not how to sell. Selling involves building trust and that’s not how to build trust.

Wrap Up

What’s the #1 rule?

That’s right. Get people OFF social media and onto an email list.

Twitter has provided me with years of readers for my books and clients for my ghostwriting career.

Used with focus, it can be used effectively to build a loyal following and as a place to collect new readers on your email list.

Don’t be tempted to get drawn into the politics or dramas that people seem to love on there. Remember you’re on there for one reason - to build an audience and to sell books.

It’s a useful platform to have in your author’s toolkit.