Social Media for Writers with Gila Pfeffer
Interested in growing and maintaining your social media presence? Humorist and essayist Gila Pfeffer speaks with Leigh Stein about the importance of social media for writers, with insight on how she sustains and expands her cross-platform audience of 25k+ followers. Read the interview and follow Gila on Instagram and Twitter. Here are some quick tips:
- Share other writers' content and always tag/credit properly
- Be polite
- Think about what value you add to the lives of your audience members. Do you entertain? Inspire? Educate?
- Find a supportive community, one person at a time. Your people are out there. Make the effort, it will be so worth it. Take initiative and create engagement/sharing groups on your platforms.
- Don't focus on the number of followers; focus on engagement (how much interaction your posts generate) and identifying your "thousand true fans", i.e., the people who like, comment, react and DM regularly. Those are the people who will buy your books and talk about you to their friends. Never take their attention for granted.
- Never punch down (aka don't be an asshole)
- Be authentic; people can smell BS
- Think about what tone/message you want to convey about your brand—and yes, you ARE a brand, like it or not—and be consistent. Think about consistent fonts, colors and filters.
- Don't be afraid to change things up and experiment with new content.
- At first you'll feel awkward and dumb posting videos and photos of yourself. You'll get over it soon enough. I certainly did.
- Pay attention to trends in content (e.g., Reels are doing well because Instagram is pushing them, video content and stories are more popular than static posts)
- Generate quality, relevant and compelling content
- Have fun!
