Techniques I Used to Grow My Audience as An Author

Establishing yourself as an author means continuing to grow your audience

In the beginning, I struggled to find my audience online.

I was a newbie author who didn’t know what an online presence should look like. Sure, I’d started an Author Facebook page and invited my friends to follow it, but that was as far as I’d gotten for 3 years. And after that, my Instagram was the same.

After not gaining much traction, I tried my hand at Twitter

And I was terrible there. None of my posts gained traction and my audience never passed 100 followers. It made me feel like a failure.

How was I supposed to build an audience and find my target audience if I kept failing at social media?

This meant that I needed to change how I approached social media.

So, I decided to do some market research, which meant that I needed to see what other authors were doing on their social media platforms. What kind of content were they sharing? What images were they creating?

Each platform (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter) all require different variants of content.

Here is what I found:

• Instagram was great for sharing book quotes, images of library content, book reviews, making connections, and book releases.

• Facebook was wonderful for book reviews, news updates, sharing learning information, and videos, making connections, and releasing information.

• Twitter was good for asking questions, sharing information, making connections, and sharing book promotions.

• TikTok was great for sharing comically relatable videos about being an author, book trailers, and more.

Finding this information gave me valuable insight into how I could change my own tactics to finally gain some traction.

Following the leads of the other authors I’d researched, I began to create my content.

One of the things I realized was that I needed to monetize my content. If I could find ways to adapt one piece of content to fit all my social media platforms, I was going to go far.

So for some of my posts, such as book marketing, I was able to adapt my images using Canva.com to fit all platforms.

But for other posts such as book quotes to market my books, I would need to change how I presented them for each platform. For example, on Instagram, I would pair it with an image that related to my quote. For Facebook, I would choose a longer quote and add an image of one of my characters to the cover of the book. And for Twitter, I would ask for a favorite quote from your book and then add my own quote to the tweet.

Reshaping how you present your content for each platform is how you spread the same message to the different portions of your audience.

The important thing to remember about audience building is that it takes time and consistency to do so.

After reshaping my mindset of building an audience and continuing to do my due diligence in finding new ways to engage my audience, I’ve managed to grow my audience larger than I ever could have imagined.

With my largest audience being on Twitter with 20.5k followers, I’m working hard to grow my following on Instagram (520 followers), Facebook (279 followers), and TikTok (176 followers). But as I said before, with hard work and taking the time to comment on others' posts and respond to those who comment on mine, I’m finding my numbers slowly growing.