Building A Social Hive

5. Use Hashtags
Tweets with hashtags increase the likelihood that you’ll gain new followers from those tweets. Hashtags are basically Twitter SEO. Use them and you’ll have new people finding you more regularly.

6. Be True to Your Brand
Tweets that are closest to your Twitter bio and personality (your Twitter brand, for lack of a better expression) are much more likely to be engaged with. Don’t have a Twitter brand or voice? That’s probably why your follower count isn’t climbing and your tweets aren’t getting shared.

7. Don’t Be Dull
While this may or may not be true for all, it’s true for us: less is more. Unless your Twitter brand is “trusted book reviewer”, constantly promoting your own books or those you’ve worked on is simply ineffective. It’s solipsistic at worst and just plain boring at best. Pick your moments. I have no data for this, but I venture this guess: a follower needs to encounter about 10 or more really interesting tweets from you before your one tweet recommending your book will have any chance of influencing them to buy it. If 9 out of 10 of your tweets are from a marketing posture, you’re likely not driving real engagement—not the kind that sells books. Plus, you’re dull.

Murray Izenwasser
Founder, Biztegra
8. Fix Your Website First
Let’s step away from social media and fix the one thing that is more important than social, which is your website. Trust me on this one, it’s broken. Here’s how you do this: 1) Optimize it for current SEO best practices and also some publishing-specific things such as “structured data” around your books, and ensuring “authorship” is set up with Google+. 2) Ensure you have a truly responsive website that will drive your business goals on the three major platforms: PC, Tablet, and Smartphone. 3) Integrate social media and email capture into the site itself—not just social sharing, but conversations, reviews and consumer posts, so that the conversation is captured and repurposed to help drive awareness and discovery. And use all of that relevant content to drive email registration, along with a segmented email program that speaks to your customers. (An example of a site that has recently been updated and did most of this is Simon & Schuster).