Social Networking and Your Writer's Platform

The Salton Sea Chronicles is pleased to welcome Andy Christofferson to the blog with a timely piece on using social media to build an author's platform so necessary to emerging authors.

by Andy Christofferson

A lot of writers these days look for ways to maximize their online exposure. They have a blog. They are on Twitter and they have an author page on Facebook. These are all great ways for a writer to promote their work, but that does not mean that they should all be used in the same way.

For starters, a Facebook author page should complement a writer’s blog or website, not take the place of it. A writer’s blog or website should be the foundation of their online presence, and things like the Facebook author page and Twitter should be used primarily as promotional tools.

That said, Twitter and the Facebook author pages should not necessarily be used in exactly the same way. With Twitter, your tweets appear to your followers and then are lost to the ether, but on the Facebook author page your posts are more permanent. People other than your followers can see them more easily.

Personally, I do not have a lot of the same friends on Facebook and Twitter, so by tweeting a link, then posting it on my Facebook author page, I can reach a wider variety of people. While the method of distribution is similar, with Twitter followers retweeting and Facebook friends sharing, I think with the Facebook author page it is more important to post things with specific content and in a specific way that encourages people to comment. If you can get people to have discussions on your Facebook author page it encourages them to keep coming back to it.

Some people seem to think that the goal is to get as many ‘likes’ as possible, with the idea that this will somehow translate directly to book sales, so they get all their friends and fellow indie writers to like their page, and that’s about the extent of their efforts. In the long run, I do not think this is very helpful, because if you do not have quality content on your page, and if you do not add content at appropriate intervals, people will hide your author page from their Facebook news feed and forget about it.

Like your novels themselves, content is key. Links to your works, your blog posts, reviews, and interviews are all excellent and indeed necessary, but it’s important to share them in a way that prompts people to discuss them and pass them on to their friends. It is also important to not post things too frequently. If you’re clogging up people’s news feeds with a constant stream of links and ads, they’re just going to hide your posts, which again defeats the purpose. Specifically, DO NOT link your Twitter account to your Facebook author page. That will virtually guarantee that people will hide your posts.

In closing, I believe both Twitter and the Facebook author page are useful tools for getting the word out about your literary endeavors, but only if they’re used properly.