Adding Followers - Tips for Authors

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Building your social media following, a key part of your author platform, is a lot of work. It takes time and a presence on these sites.

An author asked me recently how I find readers and book bloggers since he’s getting ready for a book launch. My advice is to start WAY before you have a book coming out. “Social” is the important part of social media. You will have more success building a following if you take part in conversations, share information (not just buy my book), and celebrate with others. Here are some of the things I’ve learned through the years.

  • Figure out how much time you can spend on your sites. You should have a daily presence on the key ones (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). I still have a day gig, so I get up early in the morning, I check on sites at lunch, and I spend some time in the evening. I visit Pinterest, BookBub, Goodreads, and LinkedIn about once a week. Remember, you still need to write your next book and do the hundreds of other things you do each day.

  • You need regular, interesting content on your sites. One day a week, I schedule the next week’s worth of Instagram and Twitter posts. I use Creator Suite (in Facebook) to schedule Instagram, and I use TweetDeck for Twitter. For whatever reason (Facebook’s algorithm gods), I’ve found that scheduled Facebook posts on my author page don’t work as well as daily posts, so I do those manually. You need to find what works for you. I typically schedule two posts a day. For Twitter, I schedule a third in the wee hours of the morning when I’m sleeping. From my analytics, I learned that I picked up different followers in other time zones.

  • People want to learn things. Every post shouldn’t be buy my book or here’s where you can buy my book. Share news, pictures, adventures, and funny stories. Figure out topics that interest you (e.g. cooking, boating, traveling, etc.) and share those types of items. Pets are popular, too.

  • You need to interact on these sites. That means liking, commenting, and sharing content. You also boost the exposure of a post when you respond to the comments. Tag people in posts and comments. People like to be a part of things and to be recognized.

  • Don’t make someone else’s celebration about you. Be genuine. I can’t tell you how many book launch or other posts that I’ve seen authors try to hijack by posting comments like, “If you like his book, you’ll like mine, and here’s the link.”

  • You don’t have to follow everyone who follows you. There are a lot of bots and lonely hearts out there. It’s tempting to accept every invitation, but be careful. While it may look like you have large numbers with all the bots and fake accounts, these aren’t real people or readers who you want to interact with.

  • Make sure that you view your analytics on these sites to see what is working. The analytics page has a lot of good information. You can see what posts and what times work the best for the most interaction. For all of my sites, week day mornings and week day afternoons seem to be when the majority of my followers are online. Twitter is a little different, I see a lot of activity in the morning, early evening (my time), and after midnight. I schedule my posts for these times.

  • For Facebook, you can invite your friends to follow your page. You can also click on the icon that shows who liked/reacted to your post, and a pop-up appears for you to invite these people to like your page.

  • Look at writers who are similar to you. Click on who they follow and who follows them. Go down the list and add people who look interesting.

  • Search hashtags of topics you’re interested in. (e.g. #books, #reading, #dogs #cooking, #blogger, #podcast, etc.) See who also follows these topics and add the interesting ones.

  • About every month or so, I use tools to clean up my Twitter (Twitonomy) and Instagram (Analyzer Plus) followers. There are a lot of accounts out there that follow you and drop you when you follow them back. I go through the list and unfollow ones with no activity or that don’t follow me back.

Building a following takes time. You can’t do “hit and runs” where you post and disappear, and all your posts can’t be a sell. I spent almost a year ahead of my next series launch doing things each day to build my mailing list, blog following, and social media spread. It’s worth it. You will see steady growth. When I started, I had three Twitter followers.