Since I’m promoting self-published work, I should work on my visibility on Twitter. That’s what everyone says. Don’t look for expert advice here, since I haven’t topped 500 followers. However, I’ve been making an extra effort lately, and I can offer some notes on how it’s worked.

Not that I like Twitter very much. It’s manipulative, giving publicity boosts to some tweets and accounts while leaving others in the shadows. Whether “shadowbanning” is real may be a matter of how you define it; certainly some users find themselves consigned to low visibility. Twitter is a game where the dealer hides the cards and doesn’t tell you the rules.

But if you play, you can improve your visibility. The first step is to link to your profile a lot. Probably I need to do more of that.

One thing that may be helping is timing my tweets. If I post early in the morning, I get fewer impressions. However, I have a fair number of European followers, so that’s not a bad hour if I want to reach them. Spacing tweets out in time rather than posting them in a bunch helps too. If you post a lot in a row, Twitter appears to reduce their visibility. Even if that doesn’t happen, readers are apt to skip over a long block of tweets from the same person. Some people use TweetDeck for this purpose. I’ve been writing my tweets to a text file for later posting; that way I have a chance to edit them or change my mind. Update: Since posting this, I’ve learned that there’s a little-known feature for creating drafts and scheduling tweets.

Following people is a good way to get followers, but don’t follow accounts in bulk just for that purpose. I look for people who have common interests with me, especially writers. Paying attention to retweets and doing searches are useful methods. Liking and retweeting tweets you like helps as well. I suspect that courting people with low follower counts works better. Will someone with 40,000 followers even notice you?

I do the majority of my Twitter reading with private lists. That lets me follow a lot of people while keeping a focus on the ones who interest me the most. If someone temporarily annoys me, I can remove them from my lists without their knowing it, so I don’t have to annoy them back.

Over-promotion seems like a bad idea. I try to limit myself to one or two promotional tweets a day and otherwise talk about various interesting subjects. But helping other writers to promote their books gets their attention and possibly a favor in return.

Those are my thoughts. I’d be glad to hear suggestions about anything I’ve missed. If you’ve got 100,000 followers, let me know how you did it.

While the increase in followers I’ve gotten from this has been modest, other numbers in my analytics have been more impressive. As I’m writing this, they show an 84.2% increase in impressions, a 93.9% increase in profile visits, and a 57.4% increase in mentions. Having active followers is more important than the raw count.

If you’d like to be one of those active followers, click over to @garym03062. Have I mentioned it enough times yet?