Increase Your Twitter Following by Sharing Peer Posts

So you’re a self-published author, and you want to get noticed. How do you do that? How do you spread the word that you’ve got a book, and that people are going to want to read it?

An Author Platform Is a Necessity

One of the most important things an author can have is a platform, an audience that’s listening. And one of the most effective - and certainly one of the most popular - platforms is Twitter. Another is to host an author blog, and conveniently, these two platforms go hand in hand. You write a blog post, then take to Twitter to share what you’ve written. Hopefully, if people like what you’re sharing, they’ll follow you on Twitter so that they get updates about your blog.

Makes sense … except for one rather inconvenient drawback: where in the heck are you supposed to find the time to blog regularly? You’re an author. That means you need to spend your time authoring your books. And without blog posts to share on Twitter, how are you supposed to gain a following?

I Tweet, Therefore I Share

Twitter is all about sharing. You can favourite and retweet things you see and like to whoever is out there paying attention. And you can also tweet links to other people’s articles and blog posts that you’ve read and found informative (or funny, or interesting, or whatever) directly. Just shorten the link and add a caption.

Sharing helpful posts that are not yours is a great way to increase your activity on Twitter, and to gain followers - and before you raise a cry of protest, no, this is not cheating. What you are doing is providing your followers, and other Twitter users who happen to notice your tweet, with valuable information. And if you’re providing valuable information, people are going to want to follow you to get valuable information regularly.

A note, though, if you are going to take this route make sure you do two things:

1. It’s imperative that you use hashtags. Hashtags are how people find your tweets. By properly hashtagging your tweets, you increase the chance of being found, and followed.

2. CREDIT the author of what you are sharing by adding their twitter handle, as well as the twitter handle of the host site (if the author is a contributor to a third-party site). It's just good manners.

Supplement Your Tweeting Efforts

You don’t have all the time in the world to blog. You are busy writing your book. If you want to build that all-important platform, try supplementing your tweeting efforts by sharing the great work of your fellow bloggers and writers.