How Should a Writer Use Social Media?
The answer is different for everyone—so it helps to figure out what you want to communicate.
So… what’s your social media strategy?
Tough question, right?
It’s hard to be a writer—much less a person—without at least one social media account, and there are plenty of experts out there who will tell you that your writing success is directly related to your social media platform and its followers.
I’ve been on social media since the early days, which means I’ve seen it evolve from a place to chat with old friends (and make new ones) to the hyper-competitive marketing-and-awareness channel it has since become, and my one piece of advice about social media is this:
Know why you’re there and what you want to share.
Everything else will follow.
(Pun intended.)
I recently redesigned my website, NicoleDieker.com. I included a subpage titled “Contact and Follow” that clearly explains how I use social media:
The best way to get in touch with me is via email: dieker.nicole@gmail.com.
I use Twitter and Tumblr to share links to my daily Billfold posts along with the other freelance writing work I do every week, so they’re great places to follow my vast & fast writing output.
I use Instagram to share what I’m reading and where I’m going. If you want to know even more about what I’m reading, follow me on Goodreads.
Sign up for my TinyLetter to get updates on The Biographies of Ordinary People, upcoming classes, and other relevant news.
This “social media mission statement” turned out to be very useful for both myself and my followers; newcomers to the blog could quickly figure out what type of information they wanted from me and where they could go to get it, and when I had a piece of information I wanted to share, I now knew exactly where to put it.
Whether or not you end up putting a similar statement on your website, it’s worth asking yourself the same types of questions: What do I want to put on Twitter? What kinds of photos do I want to share on Instagram?
If you don’t want to do Instagram—or Snapchat, or YouTube, or any of the other social publishing sites out there—you don’t have to. (Notice that my social media statement doesn’t include a word about Facebook.) If you do choose to use a social media site, it’s important to know why you’re using it and what benefit your readers will get if they follow you.
You can also tell, from my social media statement, whether I’m going to share more about my personal life or more about my writing life. Some writers share a lot of their personal lives on social media; others only post about their writing. It’s not uncommon for a writer to maintain two separate social media profiles on Facebook or Twitter — a personal profile for family and friends, and a writing profile for readers and fans.
In my case, I regularly share personal stories online — I recently wrote a blog post about how it feels to read the news while reading Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle, for example — but that type of sharing still falls within the larger category of “writing and reading.” (Or, when it’s a personal story on The Billfold, personal finance.) I want people to think of me as a writer first and foremost, and I craft my social media presence accordingly.
Remember: know why you’re there and what you want to share.
Write it on your website, if it helps.
At this point you’re probably wondering how I manage the engagement aspect: do I ask for follow-backs, do I tweet at influencers in the hopes that they’ll give me a RT, do I participate in Instagram pods, etc. etc. etc.
Although I will admit that I have occasionally tweeted something at an author I admired in the hopes that they might read it, I don’t really do any of the grow-your-engagement strategies that some social media experts suggest. Asking for a follow-back is much less valuable than earning a new follow from someone who is interested in my work.
Building a large platform quickly is less useful than building it carefully—especially because most of our writing careers are going to be related to, but not the result of, our social media engagement. Yes, there are YouTube and Twitter stars who get book deals, but for the rest of us it’s going to be the other way around; our social media feeds will help direct people to our writing. Or, if you prefer a visual metaphor:
Think of your writing as the picture and your social media accounts as the frame.
Which brings me back to know why you’re there and what you want to share. I want people to read my writing, so I let them know that signing up for my social media profiles means getting a lot of links to my freelance and fiction writing. I also want people to think of me as someone who’s participating in the larger literary community, which is why my social media profiles also emphasize what I’m reading.
What do you want your social media profiles to emphasize? That’s the foundation of your social media strategy. Everything else derives from that; the people you follow, the content you post, and the type of posts you reply to.
And yes, the rest will follow.
Slowly but surely.
Nicole Dieker is a freelance writer, a senior editor at The Billfold, and a columnist at The Write Life. Her debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000, published in May 2017; sign up with her TinyLetter to learn more about Volume 2.
