Part of self-promotion is engaging with social media, using platforms like WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and others. I use some and I’ll admit that sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with it all.
But like a shark, if my social media self-promotion machine stops moving, it dies. As with any promotion, being top-of-mind is short-lived. It doesn’t take long to be forgotten. It’s mere seconds on Twitter before a tweet fades into obscurity, unless it goes viral, a rarity. If my blog, or Facebook/Twitter feed becomes stale, people will lose interest, which could affect book sales later on.
Repetition is key. I remember an old client of mine telling me that it took seeing an ad a minimum of nine times to register in someone’s head and take notice (and hopefully action). He advertised in newspapers, a transient medium, much like Twitter or Facebook. I imagine it takes a lot more repetition on social media.
The self-promotion machine needs to be fed on a regular basis, and like a shark, it will consume everything you give it and it will eat you alive if you let it. As much as I love writing blog posts about my thoughts and what I’m working on, every day is too much. Three blog posts per week might be too much. So I’ve been turning to Twitter to help bridge the gap with shorter updates.
My new challenge
For every day this year, I’ll will post a word-of-the-day as well as a writing prompt, plus anything else that strikes my interest. I will try to maintain my #onthebus tweets and three blog posts per week as well. It’s easy to see how things time can disappear, but I believe the effort I’m putting into this venture will pay off.
Here’s what I have so far:
To be honest, some days it still feels like I’m wearing earplugs, standing in a crowd of other people wearing earplugs, and we’re all yelling at each other at the top of our lungs, but taking in nothing. It guess that’s a necessary evil. I’ll stay the course. I imagine things will shift when I release my first novel and start on my second.
