By now, you’ve probably heard the same piece of advice about effective Twitter marketing strategy in several different ways:

“If you’re at a dinner party and you’re talking about fascinating things, then everybody’s going to want to sit next to you. And they might repeat the things that you’re talking about to their friends. If you’re at a dinner party and you’re just talking about yourself, no one is going to want to sit next to you.”
–Andy Hunter from Electric Literature

But still so many literary magazine and press Twitter accounts seem to solely tweet about their own achievements. Those who are already your fans probably don’t mind your dinner party egocentrism, but it may interfere with attracting new followers. Successful tweeting is about finding your unique identity as a publisher and channeling it through 140-character comments and referrals.

Here are a few tweeters who’ve got it down pat:

Rebecca Skloot (@RebeccaSkloot)
14,098 followers
Rebecca Skloot is friendly to fans, compassionate, and has a sense of humor. Though the point of view of an individual account differs from an account representing an entire publisher, her tone and discussion of things she cares about is worth noting.

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London Review of Books (@LondonReview)
19,599 followers
LRB does talk about itself, but it’s frequently to link to blog posts that actually aren’t about itself, or to send us back to the best articles from its archives. Many of LRB’s non-promotional tweets could probably become LRB-published essays, which means readers are likely to be interested without feeling like they’re constantly being marketed at.

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Electric Literature (@ElectricLit)
151,076 followers
Finding more than 150,000 followers is no small feat. Electric Literature posts lots of links about cool literary stuff. Since they are a cool literary magazine, this makes sense. Are you sensing a trend yet?


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Graywolf Press (@GraywolfPress)
91,599 followers
Graywolf strikes a nice balance between promotional and non-promotional tweets with a personal approach, giving small details about life in the Graywolf offices and having conversations with individual followers.

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At the dinner party of Twitter, these guests are a hit. They make good first impressions through tweets that show their personality. And once followers are interested, they’re more likely to take the next step into post-dinner party friendship: reading your content.