Twitter has undergone several shocks in 2022 which has driven users to seek other places to connect. Mastodon is popular.

We strongly advise people to avoid Twitter as part of a respectable author platform. Instead, we strongly recommend that you set up on some other social media. If you have a following on Twitter try to port that to somewhere like Mastodon.

History: When Twitter was good (ish)

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where users are encouraged to make short posts of a limited character count. It is Twitter that is considered to have been the social media platform responsible for popularising hashtags.

According to The London School of Economics and Political Science, Twitter last officially updated its user statistics in 2013. For this reason, the report claims that stats for this platform are less reliable.

According to the report, Twitter has somewhere around 317 to 328 million active users. Of those users, about 16 million are UK based. The report also says that 24% of all male internet users and 21% of all female internet users are on Twitter. Globally, 37% of Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 29 and 25% are aged between 30 and 49.

Getting the most from Twitter

Active Twitter accounts tend to accrue followers over time. However, there are things that can be done to increase the rate at which this happens. In terms of raw benefit, consistent output of content on a given theme and friendly social interactions are the most effective. These can be augmented by a careful selection of hashtags.

While it is possible to pay for a significant increase in followers, these followers tend to be spam, highjacked, or non-responsive accounts. As a result, there is very little marketing value in buying followers.

Auto-posting to Twitter

Many other social media platforms allow you to automatically update your Twitter account when you post content. This can enable you to ensure a steady stream of content to your twitter followers without actually using Twitter every day.

For example, JetPack (available from the WordPress plugin repository or pre-installed on Author Buzz blogs) can connect your blog to your Twitter account. In that way, Twitter acts as a third party version of a mailing list. Albeit a less effective list.

Twitter as a cocktail party

Gary Vaynerchuk shared (on LinkedIn) a video in which he describes Twitter as a cocktail party. Rather than trying to make a presentation to an audience of perhaps none, drop into conversations that are already ongoing with a thoughtful, interesting, or supportive reply. According to Gary Vaynerchuk this is how he went from a person no one had heard of who was selling wine to a social media superstar.

• You can see his post on just that point on his site.

Followers and following

Twitter success is largely measured by follower count. While this is fine if you want to impress a contact (say, an agent or publisher) a more important metric is reach. Reach is a measure of how far afield your content is spread.

A Twitter account with a handful of followers who loudly retweet and spread your content is far more valuable than a high follower count that largely ignores you. This is why Twitter stats make such a big deal about engagement.

Hashtags

Hashtags are words that have the hash symbol before them #LikeThis. They are used to indicate the topic of the tweet. Some people monitor specific hashtags regularly. Some tags become “trending” which just means that suddenly a lot of people are using them.

It can be tempting to use unrelated but trending hashtags. Resist that temptation. Twitter – and most users – see this as spam. Instead, focus on hashtags that relate to you and your content.

Common writer/author hashtags

I’m sure this list is incomplete. If you have any additions you would like to suggest, please join our Author Buzz group and let us know.

Further reading

Mastering Twitter in 3 easy steps

A twitter scheduling trick to increase social reach