Nobody on Twitter should follow somebody in expectation that that person will follow them back. The whole point of Twitter is that people should follow the people that they’re interested in hearing from.

There is no value in following back. None. If you follow someone back in order to keep them following you, congratulations! You’ve clogged up your own timeline in order to keep a link to someone who isn’t interested in you, but just followed you in the hopes of inflating their follower count.

Every person you follow to boost your stats or to be polite takes your attention away from the people who you actually want to learn from, who actually make you laugh. And if the response is, “but my client hides most of my followers,” well that’s not interaction. You have the exact same relationship with the people that you pretend to follow as you do with the people you don’t follow. But in the second case, at least you’re being up-front about it.

Word of mouth is huge in all industries, not just books. And yes, each person only has one physical mouth, but many people have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, etc. and can spread the word in many other ways…using their digital “mouth”.

One of the big mistakes people make when starting out using social media to promote their books is that they mistake inbound marketing for outbound marketing. Marketing has changed so much over recent years that some people haven’t caught on and are using social media to blast their message at people. Doesn’t work. We have to create a community and engage with them. It’s about networking. Relationships. Blasting out a message is easier, but it’s counterproductive, as at least one commenter above expressed.

It all comes down to knowing your target market of readers. The most successful small businesses these days are catering to a niche market, and the most successful self published authors are writing to a niche. Get to know your niche, find out where they hang out online and offline, and you’re set. That’s where to start spreading your word of mouth…not by blasting out your message, but by getting to know your potential readers and engaging with them.