The best Twitter hashtags for authors

If you’re a writer in this day and age, you’re probably on Twitter. And whether you’re an indie author or not, you probably want to do some of your own marketing.

Even if you’re already a social media expert, hashtags are super confusing. Googling for a list of “popular writing tags” or “book promotion hashtags” brings up hundreds of suggestions, and if you were to use all of them you wouldn’t have enough characters to say anything about your books at all. So how does one choose?

Well, I wrote down the top 40 that kept coming up in my searches and I used some online tools to examine which are actually being used. I hope that my research will be useful to others as well.  I also made a note of how many of these uses were retweets as retweets are important for marketing purposes. Essentially you want about a 50% split, to show that tweets using the hashtags are actually being shared and not just going into a void.

Below is a graph showing the amount of times a hashtag has been used in a week. The tool I was using had a limit of a maximum of 1,500 tweets, so the tags that hit the 1,500 line are actually used more than that. I’ve listed the hashtags alphabetically.

The top 10 hashtags

1. #Storytelling
2. #BookGiveaway
3. #AmEditing
4. #AmReading
5. #AmWriting
6. #FridayFreebies
7. #Bookstagram
8. #TeaserTuesday
9. #WeNeedDiverseBooks
10. #IndieAuthors

As with everything social media related, popular hashtags are very trends-based. What’s fashionable to use today, might fall away completely by this time next year. For instance #ReadWomen2016 only had 71 uses last week while #ReadWomen2014 was incredibly popular at the time. It’s important to keep experimenting.

Are there some hashtags you enjoy using and have had success with that I haven’t mentioned here? Please leave a note in the comments!

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