Social Media For Writers
The reading world is a vast sea of content, and your voice is a lighthouse leading readers to your book. Wait, that's not how lighthouses work… Perhaps you’re more like the pied piper, whisking readers away into your story? There are lots of stories out there and your voice is your tool to find readers. Having a social media presence doesn’t have to mean a full-time job in content creation. If you haven’t created an online presence for yourself as a writer it’s not too late to start.
How much do you want to share?
There is no one way to build a social platform. Many social media gurus will tell you to find your niche and stick within it. That works for many people while others feel the need to show all aspects of themselves. After all, being a writer is only one part of who you are!
It’s important to create healthy digital boundaries and create a posting plan that is easy for you to keep up with. Posting content shouldn’t take all your time away from writing! This is social media for writers, not writers for social media after all!
Types of Content To Share On Social Media
Writing Tips
Writing tips and insight into your writing process will most likely bring in followers who are also writers. This is a great way to form friendships and build connections within the writer community. Writer social media can often be quite friendly and encouraging. People will often share their tips back to you.
Story Snippets
Sharing snippets of writing, whether it’s poems, micro-fiction, or paragraphs from your novel is a great way to create content without showing your face or putting a lot of work into visuals. These posts tend to be popular with a wide range of people. This tends to be the preferred type of post on social media for writers because it’s not creating new content and can get people interested in your writing at the same time.
Web Comics
Create a fanbase around your story. If you’re also an artist you can create character art depicting scenes in your story similar to a digital comic. There are entire social media platforms dedicated to just web comics and other forms of art. Social media for writers doesn’t have to stop at just text. Let your creativity shine!
Mood Boards
Use your page as a mood board that matches the vibe of your story. For example, a vampire story set in the city might have goth nightlife vibes. The writer might share video footage of a nightclub dance floor, smoky rooms, tattoo shops, graveyards, and interesting fashion. For a Mermaid fantasy, you would find a page filled with posts of beaches, marine life, boat docs, and lots of shimmer!
Use Your Captions!
No matter which content method you choose, make sure you’re using your captions! A moodboard is amazing but if you’re not plugging your book no one will know that’s why you’re here. Captions don’t need to be super long but they should highlight details about a character, a scene, your inspirations, process, or questions for your followers. Writing for social media is different than normal writing so make sure you’re aware of character limits.
Engage with Other Creators
Social media is meant for being social so don’t get caught up in posting and forget to chat with others! Comment on other writers’ posts with encouragement and questions, respond to comments on your posts, get discussions going, and build your community.
Consistency is Key
Despite what some social media professionals might say, you don’t need to post twice a day. Every platform is going to be different in what they want for the quantity of posts. What’s important is creating a posting practice that’s easy to keep up with. Posting every day for a week and then not at all for three months won’t help you at all and growing your following will be extremely slow. To be a part of social media for writers, you have to be, well… social.
Find a Platform That Fits
Each social platform has its own specialty and you’ll want to choose one or more that meshes with your style and capabilities. YouTube is long-form video content, TikTok is more about short-form video, Instagram is a mix of photo and video, while Threads is more text-based. You can find social media for writers just about anywhere, just make sure it’s a place you want to be.
On Storyforge you can follow your favorite writers and become a part of their fanbase so it’s the writing platform that fits everyone! StoryForge isn’t social media but it is a writing website where you can make friends, share your writing, and get lots of feedback.
