How To Write An Effective Book Tweet

“How do I write an effective book tweet?”

“What hashtags do you use for marketing your book on Twitter?”

“What works best to sell a book in a Tweet?”

Have you ever asked those questions? All three are questions that I saw on Facebook in one form or another this week, so you are not alone! I’ve found that Twitter has two types of users – those who get it and those who don’t. There really isn’t an in between. However, even if Twitter isn’t your preferred social media avenue, you can still effectively use it as a marketing tool. You just need to know a few basics beyond the fact that a tweet is limited to 140 characteristics.

Here’s what I mean…

Tweets are made up of different parts. Every tweet should have a hook – the tweet body, but you can also add other things to them to make them more effective. Things like hashtags, pictures, links, handles, etc. Not every tweet has to have each of them, in fact, it’s best to mix them up, but they all help your tweet become more effective.

Let’s look at some of them a little bit closer.

The Hook

The most important part of your tweet is your hook. This is the main text of your tweet that catches the reader’s attention. It might be a call to action, a review snippet, a question, etc.

The best tweets are ones that people can respond to in some way – physically or emotionally.

An effective book tweet, should have a link that they can physically click. You can write other Tweets that don’t, but if you are promoting your book, you should have a link to it in some way (e.g. sales page, website, a review, etc.) Even if your tweet is a quote, it should be followed by a link.

Links do take 22 characters (regardless of their original length), so you’ll need to shorten the rest of your hook accordingly.

Here are a few examples of hook phrases:

Hashtags and Twitter Handles

Hashtags are like keywords or phrases on Twitter. They can help your tweet gain more exposure.

We have several lists of hashtags that we use.

1. One for our niche
2. One for authors and
3. One for the holidays.

The general rule is that you don’t want to add more than 3 hashtags to a tweet and you always want to make sure they are relevant.

If we took the same 5 tweets from above and added hashtags, they might look like this:

As you can see, hashtags can be used within your hook or added at the end.

Twitter Handles are sometimes used like hashtags, but they really shouldn’t be. Hashtags are keywords where Twitter handles are people. They are two different things.

When mentioning other Twitter users in your tweets, you have to make sure you’re not being spammy. I generally only tag someone who is directly related to the tweet – e.g. they wrote the review, blog post, or book I’m linking to. However, there are some Twitter users that will retweet all the tweets sent to them. Staci Stallings shared a list of them in her book,  Keys to Creating a Successful Book Marketing Strategy. You can also read that section free on her blog here.

So you might take the same tweets and have:

Twitter Pics

Twitter pictures are a great way to get more visibility for your tweet. When you’re scrolling down your feed, they just jump out at you. Instead of seeing a small tweet, you get a picture:

They are also displayed on your profile on the left hand side for even more exposure:

The photos above are from our reader account, @BooklyBooks. We’ve shared quote photos, book covers, and graphics about sales we’ve run. All are good options, but you can also do niche photos or infographics.

To add a picture, simply click the camera button underneath the tweet box:

The only warning I have when it comes to adding pictures, is simply to note that in the main Twitter stream, the photos are rectangular, while on your profile they are square. So you can see how some of ours are cut off.

To prevent that, it’s recommended that all of your pictures are sized at 375 x 375 pixels. The Twitter feed will display up to 435 x 375 pixels, cropping anything larger to fit that size – viewers can see the whole thing when they click on it or visit your gallery. The 375 x 375 will be automatically reduced to the 90 x 90 displayed on your profile, anything else will be reduced and cropped. So, just something to consider.

Still not sure what to tweet? Outsource it!

Karen Banes has a standing offer to write 20 tweets for $20. We recently had her write up tweets for us and it was a great time saver.  We did tweak a few just a touch, but overall we were really happy with the results and did e-mail her with our feedback.

Here is one of the tweets she wrote for us that we didn’t edit:

Cool little #ebook, with a big bonus.Get free access to a great webinar when you buy Book Marketing For Beginners http://t.co/PzJCrJmLT2

— Training Authors (@trainingauthors) December 4, 2013

She also wrote some of the hooks above that we edited slightly. Including:

Book Marketing for Beginners: Draw up a marketing plan you can have fun with – http://bit.ly/Ijd676 and #Authors, ramp up your productivity: Write more, publish more, visit: http://bit.ly/1ejxSMs

If you’re low on time, or just want someone else to get you going, hop on over to Karen’s website.

Tweet The Distance

Once you’ve got a good tweet written, you might as well make the most out of. You can increase it’s effectiveness even more by using it wisely. Here are three ways to do just that…

1. Schedule it as a tweet via PostPlanner. They have an option to schedule recurring tweets – just make sure not to abuse this feature.
2. Post it in a tweet exchange such as this one.
3. Add it to a blog post about your book. You can find 3 Easy Ways To Add Tweets To Your Blog Posts here.

Happy Tweeting!

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