How Social Media Can Reach Your Audience
Authors who create a solid social media portion of their platform increase their chances of success
Social media is a tool that can reach hundreds and thousands of people.
If you manage to keep track of when your audience is active, what they are looking for, and what you need to reach them, you can go far. However, the key to being successful with social media falls under three categories.
“Social media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage, and build relationships.” — — David Alston, author
Consistency
Being sure that you are present on social media every day is the first step to helping your social media platform.
If you are new to the whole concept of social media, it’s good to start with the goal of making it onto social media at least once a day. And during this time you should be interacting with other people’s posts and posting your own content.
When you make an effort to show these social media platforms consistency, you increase your chances of growing your audience.
Frequency
With thousands to millions of people on these social media platforms every day, it’s easy for your content to get lost in the shuffle.
The social media feed is always refreshing as more content is placed on the platform. So, in order to stay in the feed of new content, posting several times a day is important. Why is this?
Let’s say your audience is active between the hours of 10 and 2, but you post four posts of content between 6 and 1, the chances of them seeing something you post are higher with more frequency.
For example, my audience is active between 6 am and 1 pm. So, I am to post four pieces of content between 6 am and 1 pm. Throughout the day, when my audience sees my content posting, it’s more likely that I will catch their attention.
For more information about an active audience on social media, see Learning Social Media Analytics for Audience Growth.
Interaction
The point of social media is to be social.
So if you don’t make an effort to start conversations with other people on the platform or share other people’s content, you aren’t going to show your audience that you value what other people have to say. Which in turn causes them to ask themselves why they should care what you have to say.
So how do we get in front of this?
Make a point to interact with four other people’s posts a day
Make a point to share one other person’s post a day
Make a point to make connections with others
When you try each of these things, you will get more value from social media than you imagined.
“Social media creates communities, not markets.” — — Don Schultz, marketing pioneer
Social media feels like you are casting a net into the ocean and seeing who you grab, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
For more information on social media, see:
How to Grow the Social Media Portion of Your Authors Platform