Maintaining an authorly social media presence is completely doable and has the potential to be fun too. Unfortunately, good old FOMO (fear of missing out) can often get in the way. Suddenly you find yourself posting on each and every social media platform to grab the attention of readers. The whole process becomes exhausting, demoralising, and often self-defeating.
While I personally use a handful of social media platforms as an author, I concentrate my content on one platform in particular – Twitter. Why? Well, that’s where my audience is, I find the format (micro-blogging) an easy one to use, and I get the biggest response there too.
Concentrating on one social media platform won’t suit all authors but it’s worth considering the benefits of doing so. Who knows? You may be able to drop the others and embrace ‘the one’ instead.
So here we go – the benefits of concentrating on one social media platform.
Playing to the right audience
Do you know the most important deciding factor for which social media channel to use? Audience. There’s no sense in posting all that scrumptious authorly content to a platform that your best fit readers don’t use.
By concentrating on one social media platform, you can choose the channel that your readers are most likely to visit instead of diluting your effort between multiple platforms. For some authors, that’ll mean setting up a Facebook page and joining lots of relevant Facebook groups. For others, Instagram will be the answer, or Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or yes, even TikTok.
Do your research and find out where your readers hang out online.
Prevents social media overwhelm
Social media overwhelm is real. It happens when you’re just trying to do too much:
- creating and adapting content
- posting
- responding
- scrolling
- tracking and measuring
This is especially true when you’re posting to numerous social media channels.
It can also happen when you try to understand the demands and idiosyncrasies of all the social media channels. You scour the internet for news on the latest tweak to social media algorithms and follow all the social media experts. You adapt your content to not only fit with image rules and wordcount limits on each channel, but you also try to cater to what each platform’s algorithm wants to see.
The benefit of concentrating on one social media platform is that it is so much easier to keep track of what that channel’s algorithm favours, stay up-to-date with new formats and products offered by that channel, and design your content to match.
Easier to design your content
When adapting your content to different social media platforms, the main factors to consider are wordcount, how the channel handles links, and the size/dimension/length of images and videos. For instance, one platform may prefer a square image, while another favours a landscape image.
When you concentrate on one social media platform, you quickly become familiar with the format of content that you can post there:
- image dimensions
- video length
- wordcount
- whether URLs are hyperlinked
- what type of content the algorithm likes best
Over time, that familiarity builds your confidence and cuts the time you spend creating content.
A great place to start
As an author, the main social media channel that I concentrate on is Twitter, but I also use Facebook, Instagram and occasionally LinkedIn. I started out on Facebook because it was a platform that I was familiar with. As I became confident posting author content there, I tried other social media channels too. It’s taken time to work out which platforms work best for me, with a lot of clunky posts and badly-sized images along the way.
For someone developing their author social media presence, concentrating on one platform can be a brilliant way to build confidence and experiment. You’ll quickly discover what type of content you like to create and what has the best response, be that traffic to your website, book sales, or followers. Then, if you want, you can begin to use other social media platforms too.
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Image by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
