Authors Should Focus on Turning Followers into Customers to Help Build Their Brand
In order to build a stronger platform, authors need to eventually focus on turning social media followers into customers
For a long time, my focus had been on writing books and growing the social media portion of my platform.
Social media has been a tricky piece of the puzzle in order to be noticed in a sea of amazing creators.
In my 8 years of being on social media as an author, I felt as if I was going nowhere for the first 5 years. But, I made an effort to observe what other successful authors were doing and changed my tactics. And low and behold, I managed to gain traction.
In my 8 years of being on social media as an author, it wasn’t until the past three years that I finally gained a decent following.
Slowly, but surely I have managed to grow my following to something worth being proud of. And as a result of this following, I have met bloggers, reviewers, and readers during my time in the social media world. Which as a matter of fact, has also sold me books.
So, how did I gain this traction?
I asked questions about aspects of the publishing and writing world I didn’t know
I interacted with other people's posts
I made connections during my time on social media
I tried to give back and teach what I’d learned
Now that I’ve told you how I gained this traction, I’m guessing you want to know how I’m doing on social media.
TikTok
Now, as you can see, Twitter is by far my best-performing platform with Instagram in second place. (Twitter Profile here.)
These are the two platforms I use the most. Mostly because I know them the best. On Twitter, I am able to find readers and writers, while on Instagram I am able to find readers and bloggers.
Each social media platform is going to provide your brand with a particular service.
With all of this in mind, I needed to start making some more money from my following, so I tried my hand at Twitter.
In order to focus my time on Twitter engaging with users and commenting, I use Hypefury to schedule my posts ahead.
I recently found that Hypefury has a new beta section called DM CRM.
From Hypefury
What I didn’t know about this was that I could schedule a Tweet and select the little messenger button on the bottom of the Tweet, allowing my Tweet to automatically send a direct message to users who interact with my Tweet. So, I gave it a go.
Here is my Tweet:
I managed to get 37 people to reply to my Tweet. 37 people wanted to see what I had to teach them. That is huge!
Here is the direct message they received if they commented, which I set to auto-send if they replied with the word publish.
What was wonderful about this was that each person this direct message went out to sent me a detailed message back.
I learned about what projects people were working on. I learned what troubles people were having. But more importantly, I made more connections with customers during the process.
Here are my Tweets stats:
Did I make thousands off of this post? No.
However, I did place the first stepping stone to allowing my followers to see the additional value I added based on their specific needs. Yes. And this is going to lead to more sales in the future.
But, one additional bonus to this experience was that once the offer was over, someone messaged me that they bought my book, Starting Your Publishing Journey: A Beginners Guide.
As great as it is to build a following on social media, at some point, we need to figure out how to convert these followers into customers.
Pay attention to when your posts perform the best
Pay attention to what your followers respond to
Get your followers to engage with your posts and entertain them in the process
Don’t try too hard to sell your products or it comes off as pushy
Connect with your followers so they will want to see what you have to offer
Keep these in mind and you will be well on your way to converting followers into customers.