Hey everyone,
Let’s talk numbers for a minute, shall we?
A bestselling author who I adore has 241.2k followers on Twitter. The engagement on their last four tweets has been: 47 likes, 197 likes, 16 likes, and 1.5k likes (on a story about Afghanistan).
This is not someone who writes political books, though, so there’s that.
But not all authors have low engagement.
Another author I follow, this one actively engaged in their community and who tweets multiple times a day, has 284.1k followers. Their typical tweet often gets between 200 and 1,000 likes.
This author has more than five books out but has recently been talking very openly about the financial troubles they’ve been experiencing. This is an ongoing issue and something that has created this relatability and engaged community, but am I the only one who thinks there’s a disconnect here?
The fact of the matter is, being able to say you have 200k followers or even 20k followers is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to an income.
Of the people who like and comment, an even smaller percentage buy.
Most people are not on social media to buy; they are there for entertainment.
And let’s face it, most authors don’t know how to sell on social media.
Those who do are in the minority, do it very effectively, and this is key, do it consistently.
I’m not saying social media has no value; it does. But we are often advised to build a social media following without any thought as to what we’re supposed to do with the people we’ve gathered around us.
Unless you’re extremely smart about leveraging that following (and many influencers are), you, the freelancer who has nothing to sell, or the author who will make a dollar on each book sale, are doing a lot of work to build a following that doesn’t pay off in any kind of financial sense.
Now, again, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t build a following.
Do it. But with the understanding that it’s a first step.
You need to learn how to leverage it as well.
You need to learn how to sell.
So many authors spend so much time building a following for diminishing returns.
As I wrote a few days ago, my Twitter was hacked while I was moving countries. I went from thousands of followers to zero. My FB page has 14k followers and yet, when I post something, only about 200 people even see it. If I want to reach the following that I have so carefully cultivated over so many years, I have to pay to access.
It stopped making sense to me, and so I stopped using social media for a while.
Now I’ve gotten back on to it, but I have a specific strategy that I’m going to experiment with for a while. I do want the high follower counts, but since I know that the numbers mean nothing, I’m going in with a plan of how to leverage them.
And that’s my message for you today.
For everything you do, know why you’re doing it.
Know what you’re getting out of it.
If having 100,000 followers on Twitter will help you get a book deal, by all means go ahead and build that following. Just don’t expect that to automatically translate to book sales. 100,000 newsletter subscribers, though? The book deal is almost guaranteed. And if it still doesn’t come, who even cares? You can indie publish and easily make a full-time living within months.
Numbers are great. But the true measure of the size of your audience is in the stories behind those numbers.
Don’t forget to look for them.
Cheers,
Natasha