Ask a Question
A simple tip for social-media engagement.
Hi everyone.
Social media is powerful tool for authors for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that it’s free (yay!). Another is that today’s most popular social-media platforms host millions and millions of users that you can potentially reach (and pitch your book to).
But a common question we hear from authors, once they’ve set up their public social-media accounts, is: How do I get people to follow me?
There are some simple ways to get started, like asking your friends to follow you (and asking them to ask their friends to follow you). Following other accounts, and commenting on their posts (in hopes they’ll follow you back), often works too. I’ll write about other methods in upcoming editions of this newsletter. But today, I want to focus on just one, which is both incredibly simple and typically quite effective: Ask a question.
When you ask a broad question of your followers on social media, some are naturally going to respond to it with — you guessed it — an answer! People generally like to talk about themselves, and they also like to feel helpful. When they answer your question, social-media algorithms will often show their answer (and your question) to their friends… which in turn invites them to answer your question (which puts you on their radar for a potential ‘follow’).
I have a friend named Cathy. She’s not an author, but she’s done an excellent job of building her professional brand (which includes emceeing, public speaking, and consulting) through social-media. She goes by Prairie Wife in Heels (it’s a Wyoming thing, which is very much incorporated into her brand)… and she has over 40,000 followers on Facebook alone!
Along with the blog links, videos, and photos she frequently posts, she throws out regular questions to her followers.
Here’s one from the other day:
Notice at the bottom of that screen-capture that 28 people ‘liked’ the question, and 75 answered it. That’s a good bit of engagement, and for each person who ‘liked’ or answered, some of their friends were able to see the engagement as well (even if they don’t follow Cathy on social-media).
Cathy also responds to each one of the answers she receives (which further increases her Facebook page’s overall engagement).
Here’s a question she asked a couple weeks ago:
35 ‘likes’ and 139 answers. That’s fantastic. Again, the higher the engagement, the more likely you are to pick up new followers, who will then see your other posts (including those about your book).
Cathy’s questions are usually very broad (and that’s perfectly fine), but as an author, you might want to toss out ones more relatable to your work.
If you’re a mystery novelist, for example, you could ask questions like these:
What was the first novel that really pulled you in?
Who’s your favorite mystery author?
That’s the best film-adaptation of a book?
If you’re a self-help author, you might go with questions like these:
What’s one thing that always makes you happy?
What’s a fear that you’ve overcome?
What’s the achievement you’re most proud of?
There’s an endless number of questions you could ask, but I wouldn’t post a new question every day — maybe just one (or two) a week, along with your other social media posts.
Also, make your questions attractive and colorful, like Cathy did. On Facebook, it’s easy.
Rather than standard/default text like this:
… click on that color-gradient “Aa” button, and choose something spectacular like this:
Instagram offers a similar tool, or if you want to get really fancy, you can use Canva to create an attractive image-based question:
Again, this is a very simple technique — just one of many I’ll be writing about in upcoming newsletters.
Good luck, have fun, and let me know if you have any questions.