Boost Your Engagement in A-B-C!
by Ann Suyod
Social media has become the main stage for all businesses, artists, and influencers in showcasing their products and content. Just by seeing a social media website, there are tons of posts and advertisements that pop out on news feeds. Whether big or small names, social media users try to actively interact on digital platforms for the purpose of being seen and recognized by their potential audience.
For authors to share their craft, it’s no different for them to be present within social media. By publishing their personal websites, blogging, or creating their own pages and accounts across social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, people on the Internet felt a little closer to their favorite authors. In just a few clicks, they are easy to find–like, follow and, voila!
As aspiring well-known writers, we can all relate to feeling pressured in our social media presence. Although it's a tough competition to keep up with the growing number of content creators, don’t worry. There are ways for you to get better social media engagement, all you have to learn is A-B-C!
Analyze Your Social Media Engagement
In case you haven’t checked yet, you can find how well your social media presence is performing by looking at your account’s engagement metrics. It’s been used by data analysts and social media managers to identify what their audience want to see and what they relate to most from their content. There you can see the number of engagements and reach or those who can view your post. Of course, this depends on what social media website you are on and what kind of content you are sharing.
You, as an author, have the power on what to write and publish in your account. It's your very right to exercise freedom of expression. But remember that your social media engagement relies on your target audience. To continuously have their attention, as well as to gain more followers, you must know what interests them most and apply them in your social media presence.
Consider this as part of the proofreading process, where you have to look at your performance and learn what to improve and how to excel further in your art.
Understand the Metrics
You may have noticed that social media engagements are built in numbers, which could be difficult to learn at first. It would also be hard to monitor frequently considering that social media sites are uniquely made with specific users in mind.
If you are not yet familiar with how the metrics work, you can jot down the number of reactions, comments, and shares in your posts. Track them daily and look at the average number of engagements to know what are the posts that work and don’t work.
If still facing struggles in doing the metrics yourself, you can seek help from a data analyst or search for social media management tools that can better explain the mathematics in social media.
This way, you can save time in producing content and work more efficiently. It is important to know and understand the engagement metrics as it mirrors what your audience would love to see in you.
Find Platforms that Suit You Best
Most authors might have created their accounts in all famous social media sites and there’s nothing wrong if you do the same. But always keep in mind that social media sites operate in different systems. Thus, when you get to analyze how well you are doing in a specific site, you can identify easier on what kind of posts you can produce.
Depending on how familiar you are in a specific social media, you can continue sharing your written works through the famous sites as mentioned earlier. You can also use the advantage to explore blogging sites like Tumblr, or start your YouTube account and create vlogs, or join the craze in doing TikTok videos. Anything can be a theme on your social media page, as long as it aligns to your main content and to your target audience.
If you still want to post your stories on platforms that you are not performing well, explore all the possible ways that you can publish your written pieces. After all, writing is not only done by typing words alone. You can create audio-visual outputs to influence more audiences who might like to see or hear your works.
Then again, to find the platforms that gained you more engagement doesn't mean you should abandon those social media sites that are not in your favor. But to look for your strength and weakness as an author is something that you have to deal with further. You have to pay attention in sharing your content and value with your audience.
Build Your Own Brand
Whether you choose to write a short story or a poetry, fiction or nonfiction, tradition or digital, whatever that you wanted to do can be recognized and even reviewed by people in social media.
Just like any other business, social media has done a lot to produce more creators and make their successes a news and inspiration to all. If you wish to upgrade your social media engagement, creating your own identity is a crucial part.
A way to build your brand is to see what makes you stand out from all the other authors that may have the similar points as you. Market yourself not only to look amazing in your audience, but let them know that you and your written works outshine others.
Another way is to stay authentic and relatable, if possible. You can still have your identity as an author and be more interactive with your audience. Present yourself as an author who can share stories that your readers can relate to as well.
Identify What You Can Create
In a place where everything is possible, creating content is what keeps social media going. Whether you're a public figure or a private citizen, using social media makes us content creators too as we can post anything we want to publish.
Being an author is both a blessing and a challenge. To identify what genre or literature we can focus on can be difficult that we might get ourselves, and even our audience lost in identifying what kind of authors we are.
There’s so many things you can specialize in. From there, try to point out what you can create more often and what you can write better. Always look for improvement in your writing style and structure.
Writing your stories is not just a tell-tale for your audience. You, as the storyteller, should be critical in what you would publish. The identity you created should fit well to your image and published works as a writer.
Impress Yourself and Your Readers
Being confident and passionate in your works is a characteristic that social media wants to identify in all content creators. As authors, we create stories and develop worlds that can leave readers in awe or disturb their thoughts. Art is meant to be felt in a lot of ways and we can immerse them by our writing.
It always starts with you, the author, to express what you feel and then the readers to interpret what they understand about your work. What matters is that you have connected yourself to your audience and interest them through your words.
If you like to gain more engagement in social media, you must be active in publishing your stories. Write whatever that comes into your mind and try to see if it's something that both you and your audience would like to read. Having a good amount of self-worth and support from your readers would be enough.
As an author, you know what kind of social media presence you would like to impose, but you can be experimental, too. This is to widen your knowledge whether your audience can still be interested in new versions of you and your writing. Yet, at the end of the day, you should still keep your brand as possible.
Connect With Your Audience
One important reason why most social media personalities keep on growing is because of their relation with their audience. Within digital spaces, famous authors are trending due to their talent in writing and their interactions with their fans. The more they get to publish what they are doing, their engagement with their readers becomes a topic in their community.
Even so, keep an eye on who to talk to online and how you value them. Not everyone in your community is your friend. There are boundaries that should be kept between people in social media. It’s your responsibility to keep your life private, but be as open as you can to your audience. You can be as friendly and kind in your audience while learning to keep a distance as well.
It is tough to have your relationships, let alone your connection with your audience as peaceful. In social media, there’s so many reasons to stay connected. It can be fun and scary, depending on how your audience would look at you as an author.
Know Your Place
There are chances that a content creator and their audience might have misunderstandings. Even with a lot of spaces to interact with, there are wars that go unresolved, especially online.
This is not to scare you for some reason, but as you present yourself in social media, it is important to notice your stand as an individual. As you write, you can make people think anything in the way they interpret your work. If ever your audience starts to create noise, you should take the next step with utmost care and caution.
Keeping up with your audience is a must, and is the ultimate act of building your online presence. Yet, as an author, whatever words and actions you do and share in your social media are under the surveillance of your audience. No matter what, be kind to everyone.
This is not just for the sake of your reputation in social media, nor your image as an author, but your growth as a human.
Give Rewards to Your Fans
To take note of your achievements in your social media, you can give your gratitude towards your audience by letting them have your grace.
As you and your reader have connected from literature, you can send them your regards by giveaways and freebies. It can be a form of tangible items or by a simple reaction to their comments, you can preserve and still garner the attention you can get from your audience.
And your words of encouragement, of course. That’s where they’ll capture you best.
Being an author comes in a million ways to bring happiness to your audience. Every little interaction is treasured. It would be the simplest, yet, the most endearing act of connection born from social media.
Epilogue
Writing and publishing content have always been rampant within social media sites. Despite the growing number of content creators at this day and age, having an audience is already an achievement as an author. Not only do you have a number of people supporting you, but you also get to interact and explore more things along the way.
With multiple existing writing tools, we have the freedom to share with everyone what we can offer. All kinds of storytelling is much accessible now since the digital space has become a useful way to produce talented creatives like authors. We can write our stories anywhere we go. Whenever we get inspiration from places around us or from what we discover on the Internet, we can convey them in words and share it online.
Social media is a place that informs and entertains those who use it. We may have come from different perspectives and we may have been worlds apart, but it makes us interact with each other.
As an author, building your social media presence is the modern way to influence your audience. With that, to engage in social media is an opportunity to get closer with the world. It's as easy as A-B-C.