October Novel Prep Challenge

Sounds like we need to create a social media / promotion class. Promotion comes super easy to me. My name is literally in lights here in my local area: I have neon signs on both of my music school campuses. We teach all ages but our bread and butter students are in the 7-12 range. Since I relate well with kids that age and a lot of them already know my name, it's an obvious target market for me.

This is why identifying your market is so importent. Here are the typical age ranges of people on social media, in my experience, but understand that is always evolving. As parents gravitate towards the platforms their kids are using, kids look for alternatives to hide from their parents.

Facebook is my number one platform because the typical user is parents and grandparents, and occasionally children because their parents either set up the account and manage it themselves, posing photos and such, or else they'll only allow their children on Facebook because they can monitor their activities.

Instagram is popular with teens because their parents use laptops instead of their mobile devices, and most kids, even the young ones, have mobile devices. I'm not kidding. But parents are starting to follow their kids to instagram so I'm curious to see where kids go next.

Snapchat is popular because the messages don't stay behind so parents can't monitor.

Twitter is popular with young adults, although I think its popularity is slipping. Celebrities still use it as their primary platform so young people follow their favorite stars.

Pinterest seems to be primarily moms and teachers, who like to save and share their ideas.

Understand, these are the users as they apply to my business, and they refer to the people who use the social media platforms regularly as a social network. I know plenty of non parent, non teacher folks who use Pinterest to save good ideas for themselves. I know writers who create boards for their characters and settings, for example. But they're saving the pins for themselves, not to share them socially, and they don't get sucked into the Pinterest trap for hours at a time.

By the way: our very own writing.com is a social network on which you are all already experts.

The trick to building a social media platform is to start with one of those and participate. Don't just read; comment. Don't just post; post often, and post something relevant. If you're inexperienced at it and not sure what's relevant, start with the reading and commenting until you catch on to the kind of posts people care about. People don't generally care about your delicious dinner unless it's very unique or you're posting a recipe (or if your brand is "chef".) People don't care about your day unless something really great or really tragic happened. People do care about social concerns. They care about great ideas. They care about inspiring quotes that get them through the day, but your "my life sucks" commentary will be ignored. They care about things they can relate to, things that make them mad, things that make them sad, things that make them feel good. And believe it or not, they still care about your adorable baby and puppy photos, lol.

Start interacting and building a network who cares about you, so they can care about and celebrate your book launch later.

Cheers,
Michelle