Tip #9: How to Curate Material for Social Media Posts
One of the interesting things about modern publishing, and self publishing in particular, is the extent to which potential readers want to know an author. I suppose with the incredible flood of new material (20,000 new titles per week by one estimate), being able to relate to an author might be one way for a reader to narrow down the list of potential next reads to manageable proportions. Most readers I know like to browse, but not to make a full-time job out of it.All of that makes sense if you’re a reader, but if you’re a writer, it faces you with an obvious dilemma–that is, unless you look like one of those Internet teenagers who can ramble about something for three minutes on YouTube, and get a million views and five thousand likes in three days. Oh, wait, you could also have a life so fascinating that you can post what you did that day on FB and Twitter and get ten thousand views between them, without any kind of advertising or promotion.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t meet either of those two criteria. Showing off my abs, even if I could find them, is not going to get that many views. And while my life doesn’t bore me by any means, I long ago made peace with the fact that nobody much cares what I had for breakfast, or where I shop, or any of the other mundane details of my life, most of which honestly aren’t worth posting for other people.
What I’d like to think I have is personality. If readers want to know who I am in that way, I can do that for them. But wait! If I spend too much time writing witty and/or heart-warming pieces about myself, when am I going to have time to do my actual writing, the fiction I’m hoping these same people will want to buy?
Okay, fellow writers, have you been there, wondering how to engage with readers outside your books without needing forty-eight hours in the day? I thought so.
How you react to stimuli, what you value, what you find funny, what you find touching–all of these things can reveal your personality to a reader without your having to write your whole autobiography. The key to a sane social media strategy for self-published authors is finding material you can joke about with your fans, or cry over with your fans, or otherwise create some common emotional bond.
That idea sounds simple, but it too can be fraught with problems. It’s not hard to find things to react to on the Internet, but finding enough content to produce an even, reasonably frequent flow to your social media outlets is a very different proposition. At the same time, you can’t just throw random stuff at your fans; you actually have to think about what you’re posting, or they will quickly tire of your miscellaneous output, and Internet audiences these days do not have long attention spans.
That’s where a service like Post Planner comes in (https://love.postplanner.com/) What Post Planner does is aggregate material with some degree of proven viewer appeal. I need to emphasize that you can’t just grab stuff randomly from Post Planner either, though. Remember that readers are trying to find out something about you, not get a summary of the most viral Internet content. Each piece you select for posting or tweeting needs to say something about you, so think about that as you are selecting. Also think about your audience. I will post a few things just because I like them, and if only two readers really respond, at least those two know more about me and consequently are more likely to actually read one of my books. However, if all my posts were that way, my viewership would plummet. Therefore, I try to keep an eye on what did well in the past.
Since I write YA fiction, and since my ad campaigns are typically geared to the young adult (13-17) and new adult (18-24) groups, it’s not surprising that most of my FB fans are in those age ranges. My Twitter base is a little more diverse, owing more to my Giveaways than to advertising. A lot of them are readers, though sadly not all of them. Also, since I write fantasy, I have a lot of fans into other fantasy books, fantasy films, etc., and quite a few of them are science fiction fans as well. So what works for them? Every day I try to find some material about books, reading, that sort of thing. I try also to find interesting material on education (both for the high school and college students, but also for the young parents in the mix). Since I can’t find too many real-world stories that dovetail with fantasy, I get as much mileage as I can out of science fiction concepts becoming part of real-world science.
Does all my material come from Post Planner? Not by a long shot, though Post Planner does allow me to add RSS feeds. If too many people end up sharing the same material at more or less the same time, it may look viral, or it may look unoriginal. Diversity of sources is a must, even if you use Post Planner or another service as a Time Saver. as a time saver. I follow certain Facebook pages that have posts appealing to similar demographics. I always take a look at humor sites like 9 Gag (http://9gag.com/), YouTube channels that feature contemporary music videos (like VEVO), movie trailers (Movieclips Trailers), movie reviews (Cinema Sins, Two Movie Guys and a Girl), humor (Buzzfeed Video, College Humor). Again, I don’t just grab the first thing I see and share it. Do I like the material myself? Will my audience like it? With a YA audience, I actually need to watch the whole YouTube video (most I check are short) to make sure the language and subject matter is appropriate. If I try a particular source or type of material and don’t get much of a response, I reduce or eliminate that material in future posts.
The one exception to the last sentence in the preceding paragraph is if something is very important to me. I figure that’s an investment in helping readers get to know me, even if only a few respond initially. For instance, I ran across a band, Green Screen Kids, whose lead singer had been subjected to intense cyber bullying but persevered and succeeded (http://artistecard.com/greenscreenkid#!/bio). That’s a great success story, and I tend to post news items and related video links every so often even though they haven’t produced a colossal response from my fans so far.
On a good day, I’d like to think I produce a good mix of funny, touching, and intellectually stimulating material. I can’t always predict which posts or tweets will perform the best. In fact, a lot of what happens depends on who is looking on any particular day. One article about a celeb will get thousands of hits. A week later a different article on the same celeb will get thirty. That said, I’ve found that putting in more effort in curation does make a difference. Toward the end of the school year, when I was very busy and posting much less frequently, engagement wasn’t horrible, but it was relatively low. As soon as summer (and my retirement!) started, and I worked about to ten posts/tweets or so a day, engagement doubled–without spending a dime on advertising. I do use FB and Twitter ads occasionally, but why spend money all the time when you really don’t have to?
Do I have to sit at the computer all day focused on social media? Absolutely not. Post Planner will actually let you schedule the output for a day or longer if you want and gradually release the posts. However, although I used to do that, I now use Hootsuite to take care of my scheduling (https://hootsuite.com/). There are other alternatives available, but I haven’t tried them.
Why not just use Post Planner for both content suggestion and scheduling? Post Planner does really well with Facebook posts, and it will theoretically schedule tweets, but I don’t seem to be able to control how the tweets look. With Hootsuite, I can schedule for Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus at the same time. Sometimes I need to handle the services separately if I want to say more than I can fit into 140 characters, but a lot of times I can type something once and send it to all three channels. On the other hand, Hootsuite did introduce a content suggestion feature, I but I haven’t found its suggestions as interesting as those furnished by Post Planner, and its display of them is much less visual. That’s why for now I use each tool for the thing it does best.
You don’t need a huge amount of time, even for good curation, but it’s good to make a consistent time, morning or evening, depending on your schedule, and prep your material daily. (You can schedule as far ahead as you want, but the material may not be as fresh that way.)
I hope some of you will find my experience useful. If you have additional suggestions on how to make social media manageable, or you have questions, please don’t hesitate to comment.
I’ll leave you with the Green Screen Kid video, “The Torch.” Enjoy!
(Image is copyrighted by Antonio Guillem and licensed from http://www.shutterstock.com.)
