HELP - What to post on social media?!

Discussion in 'Marketing' started by Tenderiser, Mar 21, 2016.

  1. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    Last edited: Mar 23, 2016
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  2. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    It's... going.

    I've blogged every day for, er, four days. Since I link to each blog post on Facebook and Twitter, that's one guaranteed post a day on all social media platforms.

    Interestingly most of my clicks are coming from Facebook, where I have 86 followers and not Twitter, where I'm more active and have 195 followers. I expected it to be the other way around, so that's interesting.

    I'm still not sure what the payoff is going to be but I would've had to do this sooner or later, so at least this way I can find my feet when I don't have book sales to worry about.
     
  3. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    It looks good. I blasted in, and I blasted off - the way you do on the web, read 300 words, 'seems like a nice person, [clicks like].'

    But your fiction is good writing, so doodle away on the Wordpress - and keep bashing at the...forgotten the word...the publishers...the agents.
     
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  4. Bill Platt

    Bill Platt New Member

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    The goal of social media is to attract the people who will be most likely to purchase your books.

    If you are writing romance, you want to attract people who love reading romance books.

    If you are writing science fiction, you want to attract the attention of people who love reading sci-fi.

    The easy part is figuring out what kind of audience you should pursue, according to the nature of the book you are creating.

    The hard part is to drill down into who those people really are, and further what kind of content to give them to pull them into your world.

    You can learn a bit about your audience if you research sites like Alexa.com, Compete.com or Quantcast.com. For example, here is a link to the profile for this website:
    http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.writingforums.org

    By looking at the data at the bottom of the page, you can gain insight on the breakdown of the sexes, average education level and from where people are browsing the website.

    Ideally, I want more information than just this, because I want to really understand my target audience by income level, married/single, with kids or without, age, etc. Quantcast generally has that kind of information for sites they have tracked. WritingForums.org is not a site that they have tracked.

    Where this is useful for you is when you can find the website of an author who writes books similar to yours, then you can pull the analytics data for the other author's website, and thereby gain a better understanding of who is in your audience.

    Where this is really important is when you can identify whether you should be talking more to women or men, and whether you should be talking to older people rather than younger people.

    Through Facebook insights, I have been able to verify what I have always expected and that is the people who pay attention to me are 65% female, and 80% of my following is between the ages of 35 and 65.

    This information helps me, because it allows me to see how I need to write to better communicate with my target audience. It is to my benefit to talk about the silly things my kids do, and it is to my benefit to speak to my people as if I understand that they probably now have extra cash now that the kids are grown and out of the house. It helps me by forcing me to write using emotional words that do not include a lot of testosterone. ;)

    Knowing your audience is first. Knowing how to talk to your audience is second. And the most important is talking to your audience in a way that gets their attention.

    Which naturally brings us to your real question, what you should talk about in social media.

    This list isn't going to be all-inclusive, but it should give you some real insight...

    * Mention authors who write books similar to yours.
    * Talk about books that are similar to yours.
    * Talk about new releases of books similar to your upcoming books.
    * Talk about best sellers in your sub-genre.
    * Review books in your sub-genre.
    * Interview authors (or link to existing interviews with authors) in your sub-genre.
    * Start conversations asking for feedback about books in your sub-genre.
    * Write short prose to tease books by other authors in your sub-genre.
    * Write short prose to tease the books you are writing now or the books already available.
    * Release PDF downloads of sample chapters from your books.
    * Release PDF downloads or just make simple posts that could be viewed as a prequel to your upcoming or existing books.
    * Release PDF downloads or snippets in posts that introduce your characters.
    * Build a series of posts that slowly introduce your characters. Make em fall in love with your characters, before you even release your books.
    * Write 1-2 paragraph teasers of what will happen in your book. With an eye towards getting people ready to want to read your story.
    * Pose questions related to the characters in your books. For example, "How do you think Samantha will respond when she learns John's secret?"
    * Create curiosity about your stories, leading people to want to pay attention to the release dates of your books.
    * Where possible, ask them to join a mailing list so they can be notified of when your books are released.

    The end goal is all cases is to target the right people -- people who are likely to want to purchase your books, then to get them excited about you as an author and your current and future books.

    You want people to follow you on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. But where possible, you want those people on a mailing list so that you can send book announcements to them directly.

    As a writer, you want to use social media to create interest in what you write, and then to create excitement and desire in the mind of the reader to own your book -- now or when it is released later.
     
  5. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    Thanks. :)

    So far the posts that are getting interaction from potential readers are the ones where I don't talk about books at all. Thinking about myself as a reader, not a writer, I can see why--when I go to an author's profile on Twitter and all they Tweet is book promotions, I don't follow them because I'm not interested in being advertised at all day. But the authors who are funny and post stuff that I'm interested in (i.e. not books I haven't even read) I will check out their books because I assume they'll also be interesting and make me laugh.

    So, for better or worse, that's the approach I'm taking: be funny, be interesting, be human, don't spam my readers with adverts, and hope that translates to book sales.
     
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  6. Bill Platt

    Bill Platt New Member

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    You make a good point. You do need to make the connection with your readers, by being interesting and not being a bull horn advertising your books directly all the time. ;)
     
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  7. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    All of your advice is about books. I don't think that's the best plan. I read an author because I want to read that author's writing. Discussion about other people's books, and bits of inevitably-unsatisfying writing from the book (inevitably unsatisfying because it's just going to be tiny teasers), isn't going to provide a satisfying sample of that author's writing.

    To be a likely someday-buyer, I need to get to the point of saying, "Wow, I enjoy this person's writing. If they release a whole book, I get to enjoy it for a lot longer." That means that the writing needs to be fully satisfying in the format--intermittent small pieces--that is currently available for that writing.

    As an analogy, if a chef is showing up at a Taste Of Wherever event and handing out samples from a booth, that chef isn't going to make up a big batch of their famous coq au vin and hand out tiny, damp, context-free bites. Or at least it would be unwise to do so. They're going make some little visually-interesting delicious bite that pays off in the context that's available to that chef at that event.

    I just read The Man Who Cried Duck. That is a perfect hors d'oeuvre. Tenderiser, in my admittedly non-expert opinion, you're doing it right.
     
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  8. A.M.P.

    A.M.P. People Buy My Books for the Bio Photo Contributor

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    Hah!
    Told you to write about the mundane and people would love it :p

    Glad your website is starting to take shape.
    It'll be your e-home for years to come.
     
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  9. Bill Platt

    Bill Platt New Member

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    Writing about authors who create books similar to yours is a matter of being able to talk to the right people. If I write science fiction / horror, my target audience includes people who read Stephen King books. If I write some small tidbit of news about Stephen King, or I link to an interview with Stephen King, or I talk about his upcoming books, then his readers may be more inclined to follow my timeline and pay attention to what I say in the future.

    Short one-paragraph teasers about my book are not going to be completely satisfying, but those will instruct readers to "look for" other materials I have written.

    Maybe I am using a sample chapter for one of my books as a part of my overall marketing campaign. Then when I write a one paragraph snippet, I can invite those readers to read my sample chapter.

    If I see a 2,000 word post by some author I have never heard of before, I am not yet convinced that I want to take the time to read 2,000 words. But if I see a 50 word post that teases my attention, and that short post points to a sample chapter, I will be much more inclined to take a look at that 2,000 word post.

    The 50 word post might invite the attention of strangers, but it will not lead to a sale all by itself in the absence of other marketing materials.

    However in context of using my 50 word post as a teaser for something more, I can lead a reader from a short piece to a longer piece, and eventually to my book.

    People have short attention spans these days, so the short posts provide the fodder that will lead a reader to explore my work further.

    If I can get their attention for 50 words, then I can get their attention for 2,000 words, and if I am truly talented, I can use the 2,000 words to lead someone to a purchase page to buy my novel.
     
  10. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I'm actually more likely to start reading the 2,000 word post than the 50 word post. I can stop whenever I want, but 2,000 words offer the possibility that there's going to be something of interest there, whereas there's really not much of interest that you can say in 50 words.

    And 50 word with a link, when you could have just handed me the longer bit immediately (for example, on Twitter you can't offer me the longer bit immediately, but on a blog you could)...I feel manipulated. If you want to offer me something, hand it over. If you want to lure me around with breadcrumbs, go bother somebody else.

    You might be right. If your goal is selling beer or candy bars or bedroom slippers or a movie ticket, odds are that a short pitch is necessary. But I feel that when your market IS readers, then assuming that your market doesn't want to read may be a mistaken assumption.
     
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  11. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    For what it's worth, nobody seems interested in the short stories I posted (around 2,000 words). My blog posts about random stuff have for more views than them.

    I'm trying to figure out why some of my posts are more popular than others but I haven't blogged enough to really see patterns yet. This process is equal parts frustrating and fascinating.
     
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  12. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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  13. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    Didn't even realise this blog was yours until I got to the bit about the cricket match and then I was like, isn't that tenderiser's story!?

    I gotta say, I am rather surprised by how well I seem to remember your novel that I've never read. Your synopsis, whatever my criticism was (I don't honestly remember now), must have been pretty decent! Like, how long ago did you share it with me!?
     
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  14. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    You hated my synopsis (with justification - it was shit!) but I think it was about... four months ago?

    I'll send you a free copy when it's out. :D Or you can have a Word file whenever!
     
  15. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    Well I don't know about the random stuff blog entries, but 2000 words is very long to read on the screen. I remember when I worked for a website, I was told to write paragraphs that were a whooping ONE SENTENCE LONG, and to ensure there's a blank line between all these paragraphs, and the entire article, written in single-sentence paragraphs should be no more than a couple hundred words (1 page max, the shorter the better). Theory is that no one likes to read on a screen and they lose concentration fast on a wall of text. Of course we're all writers/readers here so our tolerance is a bit higher, but I suspect maybe this factors into why few people view your short story entries?

    Needless to say, being a writer, I was rather frustrated to be told I can only write as briefly as possible :wtf:
     
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  16. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    That seems likely. I think my popular blog posts come in around 1,000 words but I break them up with pictures and different formatting and lots of paragraph breaks.
     
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  17. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    I did!? Oh dear... :confuzled: I shall assume then your synopsis has changed drastically to land an agent!?

    But surely it couldn't have been that bad if I still remember so much months later... I read it only once! I mean, I do have a pretty good memory but this seems unusual...

    Ooh free copy yes please! You mean an actual paperback? :cheerleader: Word file is cool with me too - epub might be best because I read on my phone these days. I do enjoy a fun chick lit, as I think your genre is. When is it out? What's it called again?
     
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  18. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I generally don't read fiction online. I'm always surprised when the very few people who read my short fiction pieces online express pleasure at my having posted a new one. Online just doesn't seem like the place for fiction, but I don't know why.

    Nonfiction, blog posts, "column" like material, seems perfect online. Maybe it's because my history with reading things online started in the stone age with Usenet.
     
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  19. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    Well it was still fairly shit when I sent it out (I'm literally incapable of writing a good synopsis or query) but I assume my agent either overlooked the crapness or read the book before the synopsis. :D

    It's a contemporary romance currently called Untouchable, but we haven't sold it yet so I'm not sure when (WHEN NOT IF, OKAY BRAIN?!) it will be out or if the title will change. I can send you a .mobi though?

    I won't be writing any for the site, that's for sure! I just stuck up the ones I'd posted here in the short story competitions. They're the first 'blog posts' on my site, back when I made this thread and had no idea what to write.
     
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  20. NigeTheHat

    NigeTheHat Contributor Contributor

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    Different people have different preferences. Who knew?

    The cool part is you don't have to try and work out what's going to work best for your audience, you can just do everything and see what hooks people. Because it's the internet, and it's made of magic. Also cats, but mostly magic.

    And I think that's what @Tenderiser's doing anyhow, so I guess we'll find out who wins eventually. Anyone want to set up a betting pool?
     
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  21. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    I am posting a lot about cats. *nods*
     
  22. Bill Platt

    Bill Platt New Member

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    My wife spends most of her days reading fiction on AdultFanFiction websites.

    I am not sure what the draw is myself, but I do hear that it has something to do with all of our favorite characters engaged in some really sexual situations. :)
     
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  23. A.M.P.

    A.M.P. People Buy My Books for the Bio Photo Contributor

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    That's the reason fanfiction exists.
     
  24. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    Mobi is just fine. I have a Kindle, which I don't use so much anymore 'cause faffing around with electronics when you have a baby in a carrier and a nappy bag dangling on your side is just well... a faff! But I will just use Calibre to convert it :D

    Still can't believe you're gonna be published. So awesome :cheerleader:
     
  25. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    Got my first troll! I'm in the big leagues now, people. :D
     
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