Tracy Brady Cartoons

Many, many, many cartoonists and webcomics (among others) use Twitter as marketing device to promote readership of their comics.

The most significant problem with Twitter is that despite its use of several real world rules of interpersonal engagement, presently it is populated largely by bots and people more interested in plying their wares than in making friends. The thing about Twitter is that for the most part, making friends is essential to successfully plying your wares. Finding an audience for your webcomic or blog content can be difficult unless you are both socialable and employ strategies that include these three proven gems:

Use hash tags: A hash tag or the “#” symbol is a great way to categorize your tweet so that it is more easily searchable. Webcomic artists tend to use hashtags such as #webcomic, #comic, #humour and #funny at the end of their tweets for this purpose.

Build up real base of Followers: As mentioned, interacting on Twitter is very much like interacting in the Real World, many of the same rules apply. While many people simply open accounts and send out general tweets that hang in the ‘Twitterverse’ for any and all to see, these tweets garner much, much fewer views than those sent out by people with an active follow base. An active follow base comprises of persons actually interested in what the tweeter has to say. It takes time to build such a follow base, and there is no magic way to do so since it wholly depends on other people’s level of interest in you. Some suggestions for building an active base is to seek out like-minded tweeters, and engage them in meaningful conversations that foster relationships that turn them into your audience and you into theirs.

Re-Tweeting: One very effective way of showing you are friendly on Twitter is to practice re issuing the posts of people you would like to be friends with. This action is called ‘Re-Tweeting’ or ‘RT’. Retweeting is a means of sharing the attention of your followers with other people and it’s recommended that you add the name of the person whose post you are retweeting so that they will know you’ve done the good deed. (A name is always written preceeded by the ‘@’ (eg: @dirtyjobcomics) When tweeting about your own content, it is also recommended that you ask other people to RT it if they like it. In this way, they can share their followers with you too.

There you have it. 3 great ways to help you optimize your promotion drive on Twitter. Please use Twitter generously and happy hunting.