Self-Promoting on Twitter: First Contact
We joined social media, more specifically, Twitter, in February 2022 to promote Lesson One: Vampires and our first blog. It took some time until we figured things out. We didn't have a profile pic, not even a name, just the handle, for a while. Our first promo posts were embarrassing and went mostly unnoticed. Later, we started correcting a few things, though we didn't immediately became The Snarky Cats of Ulthar. However, it only took a few months for us to see that things were going to be harder than we had thought, and we hadn't expected them to be easy.
The biggest hurdle anyone promoting their indie books on social media must overcome was our own self-awareness. Too much of it can be crippling, and that we were trying to sell something and people don't generally like being sold stuff didn't help. However, that wasn't the worst part of self-promoting. The worst part was when we had to tweet out Book Updates. We knew how many people had bought our book - we knew how many people didn't care. This, of course, included our followers, who hadn't necessarily followed our account because of our riveting content, but rather hoping for a follow back to boost their numbers. But we still had to tweet like there was someone out there who was interested in our work. Have you ever seen a video of Elon Musk dancing? That's what we believe to be the ideal level of self-awareness for promoting one's self-published book on Twitter. However, after we manage to lose, or at least significantly lower our shame levels, there was still another little problem to solve: how to make people see those shameless promo tweets.
Hashtags seemed like the obvious answer. After all, hashtags help sorting out tweets and make it easier for people to find what they're interested in. Well, yes, but they also make it really easy for people who don't want to see some nobody's desperate pleas for downloading their e-book to mute your promo tweets and purge them from their timeline. That's what's been happening to the annoying Writers' Lift within the Writing Community. Hell, even #WritingCommunity itself fell out of favour at one point precisely because it was been used (and abused) for self-promotion purposes. So, we weren't just choosing which hashtags would give our tweets more visibility - we were also choosing which hashtags wouldn't get it banished to the dark corners of the Twitter cybervoid to die a slow, agonizing death of single digit Impressions and zero Engagement. We rarely used #ShamelessSelfpromo and tried to avoid #AvailableNow at the time, and haven't used them in ages.
Then there was the fact that Twitter Math doesn't work like normal math. Logic dictates More Followers = More Impressions. Well, logical thinking has no place on Twitter. The more followers we had, the less Impressions there were per tweet. We're not talking about Likes or RTs, but Impressions, which is basically the number of people who see our tweets. As the number of followers increases, so should the number of timelines our tweets appear in be greater, which would mean more people are seeing them. Somehow, we ended up stuck in a Twitter Paradox in which the opposite happened. Even accounting for bots, it was insane how our tweets were getting less views than when our followers numbers were two digits. So, who was hiding the tweets? Well, we've already covered the Mute problem, but there was something else anyone trying to self-promote on Twitter should take into account: the capricious Twitter Timeline. Annoyingly, many of these issues still exist today. Some tweets were/are hidden under More Tweets, and worse, it sometimes randomly jumps to the top, and you lose the older tweets you hadn't seen yet. Also, if you click on a thread, you could end up in a different point in the Timeline if someone replies while you're reading it, getting it closer to the top. We could see this happening to other people's tweets, which meant that it was happening to ours, too. Were people ignoring us or weren't they even seeing us? We wish we could say we found a solution to this particular issue, but sadly, we haven't. We tried tweeting at different times, but didn't see much improvement. After we ditched the first blog and moved to Blogger, we managed to break out with two tweets about Netflix Taiwanese horror movie Incantation, with one having gone over 300 Impressions and the other one over 200 Impressions, but that translated into 9 Post Views on our blog.
And then there was the matter of content. We couldn't limit ourselves to telling people how awesome our book was and that they should read it immediately. A little self-confidence is good, but let's not get delusional. We weren't (and still aren't) celebrities with a legion of fans - we were nobodies. We had to give people something other than shameless self-promotion. Unfortunately, despite our name, we own no cats (or other fluffy pets) that could be used to draw attention to our account. Really, cat owners have a natural advantage. So, we were forced to split our creativity between finishing our next WIP and coming up with interesting stuff to tweet. We certainly weren't going to open our privacy to the ravenous wood-chipper of Twitter trolldom, and not just because that would bore everyone to death. Maintaining a Twitter presence for marketing reasons takes a lot of work when you're a virtual unknown competing with equally desperate but already more established indie authors (many of them with cats), who've been doing this for years. You must have something else to offer, something to set you apart from the crowd. Some people put as much effort in their tweets as we do writing a twice as long blog post. All we could tweet about were movies and books, and so we did (and still do). What got more engagement and still does is Horror. Good thing we like Horror.
As for how to find followers, apparently just introducing yourself as being new to the Writing Community and saying you want to connect with other authors works wonderfully. Many people who did this and joined after we did quickly got more followers than us. That we're not people persons, even with the entire Internet between us and everyone else, didn't help. We found that hashtags could be useful in finding other communities and tweeting for them. We also found that you should ALWAYS search unknown hashtags to see if they're really what you think they are, after we got an unexpected dose of Twitter porn when trying to see what 'offers' was being used for. Reading many tweets from the Writing Community complaining about other accounts taught us how important it is to screen new followers before hitting Follow Back, no matter how desperate you are. You do NOT want to be stuck with a loon. That will not only drive away all the normal, nice people who already had the misfortune of dealing with their crazy ass, but also cost you followers as the people complaining about them start unfollowing any accounts they have in common.
At first, we were only tweeting our stuff, but later realized the usefulness of retweets in increasing our tweet numbers. We made sure to stick to tweets that matched our own thematically, and as tempting as it is to help a fellow author, we tried to limit the self-promo retweets, and we never engaged in a Writers Lift. We also made sure to always have a Pinned Tweet so that the first thing someone who happened to check our profile saw wasn't someone else's promo tweet.
Those first few months on Twitter made it clear that being on social media is a lot of work, and in our case, unpaid work. And of course, all this in addition to working on our WIP, which is the only reason we joined in the first place. From February 2022 to July 2024, our account grew to 500 followers, most of them real people (or at least they're very good at pretending). Impressions got better, but engagement is low. Still, we can't quit, as we're dependent on it to promote our books and our blogs, though we're being far more successful with the latter than the former. We still have no idea which tweets work better, or which tweeting hour is more favourable. At this point, it feels more about luck than anything else, and we can't control that.
