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Let me start by reiterating: I haven’t a clue what I’m doing. Not when it comes to promoting my own work, anyway. Or, I suppose, better said, I know what to do and I can tell you precisely how to do it. But I can’t do it for my own work to save my life, or to earn any money.

I’m going to chalk that up to the fact that I have far too many jobs and, my sources tell me, just the right number of kids. The time is now, though, and I’m going to preach a little in the hopes that my practice eventually catches up.

Social media is this broad, scary term that actually encompasses many different aspects of your online existence that are within your control:

Platform: Where are you?
Presence: What do you do there? How often?
Engagement: Whose work do you enjoy and interact with?
Audience: Who enjoys and interacts with your work?

I’ll talk about these from the bottom up because, while we tend to obsess about building a platform first, starting with your audience in mind is the best way to decrease the amount of time you spend screaming into the void.

Who is your audience? (Hint: It’s not you)

Ever heard the advice, “Write the book you want to read”? That’s definitely what I did. I’m a discerning reader, so it made sense. If I like my book, people will like my book, too. But I have some other characteristics my average reader probably won’t have - which makes the “would I appreciate this?” test pretty skewed when thinking if people will care at all about what I have to say online.

The writing community is Just So Supportive! But they’re probably not your audience, either.

As a member of the writing community on Twitter, Medium, and Instagram for four years now, I know firsthand how supportive the writing community is. It’s super affirming to hang out with a bunch of writers who are happy to give a #writerslift or a pinned RT - or who will subscribe to, read, and interact with your newsletter. but your average reader isn’t likely to be a writer. And most of that interaction online isn’t going to translate to conversions in the form of subscriptions, sales, or whatever your metric of choice is. Also, as a writer, I subscribe to far too many newsletters out of support for my fellow writers, and I’m not the only one. I couldn’t possibly convert to paid, or buy books, for every writer I support online.

So if all you’re doing is providing content for, and interacting with, other writers, you’re going to end up creating and putting out a lot of content that doesn’t give you a lot of return on investment (unless, of course, you’re writing things specifically to benefit other writers - in which case, engage away).

Who wants what you have to offer?

A lot of content creation starts with the question, What gap or need can I fill? Assuming you already have something to offer, you might instead start by asking yourself who wants what you are providing. The “Would I read/enjoy this?” question is a good starting point, but then you must go further and ask, “Who else would?”

That’s your audience. The folks who will read and enjoy and share your work are the ones you want to find on the internet. But how do you make them aware of your work so they can get started reading, enjoying and sharing?

How are you engaging with your audience?

Well, first, you have to find them. Depending on where you hang out online, this can take many different forms.

Become a part of the conversation

If you write about something topical or timely, find conversations about that topic. My novel, for example, involves artificial wombs and a friend sent me a BBC story yesterday that posed the question, “Could artificial wombs be the end to natural childbirth?” or some such. If I had the bandwidth (see: practice vs. preaching) I would find where people are talking about that on Twitter, or find the story on Facebook, and chat with folks about it.

I wouldn’t comment solely on the story, either. I’d interact with the folks commenting on the story. And, though it would be difficult - nay, painful - I would not mention my book at all. Not even one bit.

What I would do, if my book were available for sale, is to pop a link to it in my pinned tweet or bio to make it really easy for folks who are chatting with me to click on my name and see I have a book for sale that addresses the topic we’re chatting about. It’s not, so maybe instead I’d make sure there was a prominent description of my newsletter and link to it in my bio.

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Hang out with similar or adjacent creators

Chances are you know of other writers who tackle the same kinds of topics, or adjacent ones, and who are also online. If you write about the same things, you probably will enjoy hanging out on their profiles and getting to know their work and their audience. Having genuine conversations - especially in an area where you’re an authority - where you’re not trying to sell anything and are truly just interested in sharing what you know and learning from others can build your authentic online presence in a way that makes it feel not so laborious and scary.

And, again, you’re not just there to interact with that other creator. You’re there to build a dialogue with their audience. Soon, they might become your audience as well.

Join groups and follow hashtags

Facebook groups and Instagram hashtags are a good way to get involved in conversations about your genre or area of writing, too. Finding the right Facebook groups can be hard, especially for someone like me who just melts into a puddle when I even try to distill my novel into anything resembling a group topic. But then I think about the themes of the book - motherhood, family, feminism - and the elements present in the book - a pinch of dystopia, a splash of speculative fiction, and a good deal of revolutionary/resistance.

And now, I have plenty of keywords to search on any platform to see what kinds of groups exist and the conversations that are happening.

Enjoy yourself!

Above all, you’ve got to at least act like you’re pleased to be there. And that’ll be a heckuva lot easier if you really are enjoying the conversations you’re having.

Share Nicci’s Notes

What are you doing online, and how often are you doing it?

Notice that, as of this point, I have said nothing at all about promoting your work, dropping links to your content, or even telling anyone what you do for a living. Think about it. When your audience is online, they’re looking to learn something or entertain themselves or find something to distract them from the real world. They don’t care about your newsletter, and they’re not going to be inclined to read it, much less subscribe, because you posted it somewhere they hang out. More likely, they’ll be like, “Who’s this person?” and scroll on.

If you’re hanging out with them all the time, and you get to know them, and they get to know you - well, chances are, they’ll have realized the value you bring to the conversation and clicked on your profile pic at least once to see (hopefully) the place you want them to go next - your website, your Amazon store, your newsletter landing page, or whatever. In fact, the best way to get traction on your work on social media is not by sharing it yourself - it’s by others sharing it.

Show up in good faith

So here’s what you need to do in order to make all those things happen: Show up. Yes, you should have content on your page so that when people click your name they see something representative of the work you do and maybe are inclined to go further down your sales funnel. But mostly, just show up. Be authentic. Be in the spaces that will connect you with the folks you want reading (and paying for!) your work, and be there frequently enough that the regulars will start to recognize you.

Provide value

Okay, so finally for some self-promotion. In all your online actions, you should be providing something of value for the folks on the other side of that interaction. As I mentioned before, we go to the internet for information and entertainment. Anything that’s too promotey really only provides value for you, not anyone else.

So when you post or interact online, you’ve got to be thinking of what will make your audience feel like what they just read/saw was worth their time, and entice them to share or take another action towards a sale. That might be in the form of memes and GIFs, graphs and graphics, quotes, cute photos of your dog or baby, a sense of vulnerability, or anything else that someone in your target audience would look at and think, “Wow, I’m glad I saw that. It was [funny/interesting/heartwarming/insert-adjective-here].”

I was in a session recently with Michael from Brent and Michael are Going Places, and he gave some great advice - 90% of what you do online should be authentic engagement, and only 10% should be self-promotion. And I’d go as far as to say pretty much 100% of the actions you take on posts that aren’t your own should be authentic engagement. It feels spammy and desperate to see “I just wrote this about that thing! Read all about it!”, even if it’s relevant. You’re not going to get any conversions from that kind of behavior anyway, so no need to waste your time on it.

Where are you and how do you present yourself?

Alright, so there are a lot of places online where you could go to interact with your audience. Ultimately you want them to end up in a place that’s going to (if only eventually) make you money: your webpage; your newsletter/mailing list landing page; your store. But that’s not usually where they start. Most folks who convert to paying customers come from elsewhere, including social media.

But there are different kinds of people hanging out on the different channels, and people go there for different things.

Twitter - news, timely quick nibbles, pithy one-liners that can be screen-grabbed and used on other surfaces. Biggest concentration of users aged 25-49.
Facebook - memes, affinity groups, photos of the kids of the person you graduated with but haven’t talked to since. 65% of US users are 35+.
Instagram - visual media: quotes, gorgeous photos, especially of food and nature, lots of vulnerability sharing. Users skew way young (says this 40-year-old), with about 60% of users under 34.
TikTok - visual media, mostly in the form of videos or stills stitched together. Even younger demographic (62% under 29!), though there is the occasional TikTok grandma and us middle-aged folks are slowly awakening to the possibilities on TikTok. Very slowly.
LinkedIn - professional networking and industry news. Most users fall in the 25-54 age group.

Remember when we were talking about your audience before? What your audience is expecting on a platform can go a long way to determining what they’ll interact with while they’re there. Pick the platform that most matches your work and audience, then tailor your content and interaction to the platform.

AND THEN (or, really, before that, because this all needs to be in place before you begin engaging if you want that engagement to result in readers and paying customers) you need to make sure your profile and bio communicate clearly who you are, what you do, and why people should click through to see what you have to offer.

Grow an authentic and meaningful social media presence in five easy steps

Now that you know the important principles to using social media to promote your writing - or, more accurately, to become a member of a community of people who will hopefully read your writing and eventually pay for it - here are some steps you can take right now to make your social media work for you.

Identify your audience. Some people like to create an actual avatar or persona they can think about and reference when they are about to publish something online, to be sure their work is going to be valuable to their representative audience. However you do it, figure out who your people are, where they’re likely to hang out, and what their intent is when hanging out on the platform.
Create a bio that will appeal to your ideal reader and clearly conveys who you are, what you do, and why people should follow you, buy your books, visit your website, click on the content you provide, etc. [And be sure to include that call to action (CTA) in the bio itself!]
Identify some other creators who overlap in content and with whom you will, therefore, share an audience. Hang out where they hang out, get to know their readers, and engage authentically.
Join some Facebook groups and/or follow hashtags that align with your content area. Then, hang out regularly. Ask genuine questions, provide genuine answers, and engage in authentic dialogue.
Don’t forget to enjoy yourself! If you’re not having fun, it will show. Engage in areas where you genuinely care what’s going on and what people have to say, and social media will feel a lot more tolerable.

I hope this helps demystify a big, unwieldy topic just a little. Do you have anything else to add? Leave a comment below!

Five Steps to Growing Your Social Media…