Building Your Following - Tips for Authors
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Building a following on social media (or building your author platform) takes time and patience. Here are some things that have worked for me.
Pick one of your social media sites to work on for a month. Follow 10 new people each day.
Set aside some time every day (even if it’s only 10-15 minutes) to be engaged on social media. (This is the social part.) Make sure that you like, comment, and share others’ posts. Join in others’ celebrations. Make sure to tag people when you mention them.
Decide what kinds of followers you want to focus on. Are you looking for bloggers, podcasters, bookstagrammers, readers, librarians? Take a few minutes to look at bios and follow those you have a shared interested with.
Look at author accounts that are like yours (e.g. your genre). See who follows them and follow them.
When someone follows you, look at his/her followers. Choose ones that have things in common with you to follow.
Make a list of themes in your book. For my current series, mine are glamping, vintage trailers, tiny houses, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Search for those topics to find people and accounts interested in your book topics.
Make sure that you post to your major social sites regularly at whatever interval works for you (e.g. daily, weekly, twice a week, etc.).
Look at the content of your posts. People are looking for entertainment and information. Your posts shouldn’t all be “buy my book.”
Use your analytics page to see what posts and what times of day are getting the most attention. Then post (or schedule your posts) during those timeslots.
Pick one or two of your socials that you want to work on and add the link to your email signature. You’ll be surprised at the people you correspond with that don’t know you’re a writer.
I started out with three Twitter followers. It took a while, but with some care and feeding, it was worth it to watch the accounts grow.
