As a publicist AND a blogger, I’m lucky enough to see several slices of the promotional spectrum. Some may even say a publicist and a writer are polar opposites – I prefer to see it as a beneficial partnership: we hook you up with content and news ideas, you hook us up by writing about it if it interests you.

The important thing is to actually provide news that’s interesting, which, sadly, many publicists can’t claim. I feel fortunate that I get to promote cool books, interesting stories, and things that actually peak the interests of most reporters. But the key for me – and the mantra I stick to – is to remain transparent. Let’s be real people – everyone knows I do PR; and they know it because I tell them. Nobody likes to be “tricked,” manipulated or sold.

I don’t try to spin stories or use sellsellsell jargon – I like to say, “Hey, I’m promoting this. We both know that. Here are the details of what I’m pitching, and here’s why I think you’d like this. If not, cool,” and I can leave the discussion knowing that that person won’t feel negatively “sold” to, and perhaps be open to more of my ideas in the future.

And after years of learning and utilizing different methods of promotion, I wanted to share these little tidbits of knowledge with you comics creators whose strengths are in doing what you do best: illustration and writing. Public relations is not necessarily intuitive, especially in the digital age, and it helps to have a guideline to show you the way.

This is the first in a series of articles that will focus on social media for comics and webcomics, which I’ll continue to do throughout the next few months. For now, I want to focus on Twitter, with 5 tips to help you either get started or get better.

5 Tips for Promoting Your Comics on Twitter

1. Build an Audience
Easier said than done. Want to know how? Time. Repetition. Patience. The goal is to have more followers than the number of people you’re following. Although it’s generally frowned upon, you’ll need to Follow, Follow, Follow at first, everybody in the comics world – then, eventually, weed out the people that aren’t necessary to be following. There are four important tools I recommend to help you on this incredibly tedious task:

• Bit.ly – Not necessarily for gaining followers, but to make your life easier – this is a service that shortens your links so that you’ll use up less characters in your Tweet. Make sure to actually sign up for the free account – it will provide you with valuable tools to track who’s clicked on your link.
• Tweepi.com – Filter out people who haven’t updated in awhile or who haven’t followed you back within two weeks of following them (my recommended time period you give before saying YOU HAVE BEEN DELETED – unless a celebrity or prominent figure, who most likely won’t follow you back anyway).
• SproutSocial.com - Check out the trial period of this. Allows you to search for people by subject, check out stats, etc.
• TweetReach.com – Plug in a keyword, and this program tells you how many people Tweeted/Re-Tweeted the search term and how many actual people had the chance to view it.

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