Policy Press

Twitter guidelines

Despite recent challenging time, Twitter/X seems to still be one of the most effective ways we can engage with key policy makers/practitioners/researchers/ students, raise awareness of your book/journal, encourage debate and sell more copies/subscriptions. Here are some ideas on how you can use Twitter/X to help to promote your book. 

  • Let us know if you have a Twitter/X account so that we can follow you and retweet you;
  • Retweet, or quote retweet (where you add your own commentary), our tweets about your book to share them with your audience;
  • One of the keys to success on Twitter/X, and one of the challenges, is getting people engaged (i.e. getting people to do something rather than just read). Engaging with debates and interacting with journalists, authors and policy makers/practitioners raises your profile and will spread the word about your book. Aim to have a dialogue with your followers where possible;
  • If attending a conference, find out the official hashtag and tag your messages with it so they can be found by other attendees. Retweet other tweets from the event to share information with your followers; 
  • Take photos of events you attend (if relevant) and tweet. Also send them to your marketing contact so they can tweet them too. Pictures of people or very short videos are always more interesting than book stands, though please ensure you have permission to do so! 
  • Follow and retweet people you want to follow you and people who can be influential in your aims. Let us know about anyone in particular you think we should engage with. 
  • When using hashtags with multiple words, e.g. #SocialPolicy, it's best practice to use camel case (where each word in the string is capitalised). This is helpful for both accessibility purposes and also general readability.
  • If you’re introducing a new hashtag, check first to see it isn’t already being used for something else. Also note that '&' or other special characters in a hashtag don’t work.