When Social Media No Longer Works
Welcome back to the blog and this time, author Kit Erikson shared this with me…
For me, hands down, the biggest challenge is understanding how to leverage social media to gain exposure – and prevent it from eating up all of the time I could be putting into writing my next book. So far, keeping up with social media has been a time suck that is leaving me drained, and honestly, I’m not sure it’s leading to any ROI.
While many authors have had success on social media, I’d hazard a guess that like Kit, most of you aren’t seeing the results you hoped for.
To find out why we need to do some time traveling back to the days before social media came on the scene.
And yes, I can tell you exactly what it was like because I worked in PR back in those days and was even a book publicist before the dawn of social media.
If we wanted to get attention for our clients, we had to put together a pitch and send it out as either a press release or an actual snail mail letter to the media, whether that be a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station.
Sometimes you had to do a follow up and sometimes you got lucky and you got through the ‘gatekeepers’ at the media outlet and your client landed an interview or a guest spot on a TV show.
Now let’s fast forward to when social media comes on the scene.
You can finally bypass the gatekeepers by simply posting something on Twitter or a message on Facebook.
Does this sound easy?
Does this sound like something anyone, anywhere in the world can do?
If you said yes to the last two questions, you now know why most people don’t have much luck with using social media to land media attention and generate book sales.
Social media has made it so easy that it’s become a saturated pursuit.
Authors also have to compete with a lot more people who now self-publish and just use social media to post about their books.
I’m not saying social media no longer works but you’ve got to take a different approach and do some more legwork.
I’d recommend doing some research first.
Who is your audience?
Is it women?
Is it men?
Is it people in a certain age group, like baby boomers or Gen X?
What platform do people within these groups hang out the most?
One tip would be to find a best-selling author who writes in your genre and see where they post the most and to check if their followers are actually engaging with them.
My recommendation would be to not waste time on every platform but narrow it down to one and put all your efforts into that one before you move onto another one.
Posting once a month to a targeted audience is much more effective than posting every day to an audience who even if your book was free just aren’t interested in the type of stories you create.
However, my best piece of advice for you would be to bypass social media and go old school.
Put your valuable marketing time into something I feel is going to get you some results.
One thing I highly recommend for my own clients is to start with your local media.
Everyone loves to read about the people in their own towns and cities and spoiler alert, for some reason everyone loves to hear about authors and especially ones who live in their hometown.
Put together a pitch and media kit and send it to your local newspaper or a magazine, telling them about yourself and that you’re an author who’s just published a book.
Use this as a stepping stone to move onto something a little harder, maybe pitching to a podcast.
With this approach, I’m guessing you’ll get noticed by more potential readers and buyers of your books then by just posting something on social media and getting lost in the crowd.
Please check out Kit’s books and site and if anyone else has a marketing question they’d like featured on the blog, feel free to contact me at flynnmedia@protonmail.com.