And I don’t mean it like “rules for behavior.” No, I mean social media RULES the universe these days.
Let me ‘splain it you, Lucy…..
A little over a year ago I was an unknown, about-to-be-first-time-published author who had 15 Twitter followers on a good day. They were all friends and family who knew me and thought it was cute we were Tweeting one another inane things. My publisher recommended I increase my online presence to find more new readers for my books and to help promote those books through the free marketing Twitter encompasses with every tweet you send. I said, “okay” because, really, what was I going to say, NO? They were the experts. I was just a little unknown romance writer looking- hoping-praying- someone ( anyone) would buy a book from me.
I asked my daughter – the techy maven – how to go about finding new followers and she gave me a sage bit of advice. In order to get more followers, you have to…wait for it.…follow more people.
Really? Could it be that easy?
Well, I’m here to tell you that, yes, it is that easy.
I found people who liked the same things I did: writers, romance readers and writers, and book lovers, and started following them, retweeting posts I liked, and interacting with complete strangers. In one month I increased my followers from 15 to 150.
When my book came out, I started tweeting about it, using those infamous and oh-so-beneficial-hashtags, and my following soared to 300.
With the next book, I did the same thing, finding trending hashtags that compared to what I was sharing and hastag-jumped onto those tweets. This brought me even more followers. At one point I was tweeting all my new followers every time I got one, thanking them for joining and following me. This got old pretty quickly when I spent almost an hour of each day doing it, so I stopped. I thought I might lose some followers by not pointing them out, and I did lose a few. But in the world of twitter math, for every 2-3 followers I lost, 10 more came on board. Today, I woke up to 811 followers.
Folks, I don’t even know 811 people!!!
Now that I’m with a new publisher, I’ll be following more authors, and in turn, will increase my own followers even more. You can take everything I just wrote and apply it to Facebook, Google, and Pinterest as well. The more social media sights you troll on, the more “people” you will “meet.”
So, this is what I mean when I say Social Media rules. Because it does. Really. Go ahead and Tweet this and you’ll see what I mean!
And if you want to find me on Social Media, here’s where I am…ALL THE TIME!!! le Sigh!
Tweet Me//Read Me// Visit Me// Picture Me//Pin Me//Friend Me//Google+Me//
Peggy Jaeger, Author 