Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Social Strategy

What is Social Strategy?

The short answer is that it’s your plan to promote your work on social sites. The longer answer is that your plan needs to include others’ works. And it needs to include both weak and strong ties, and the long tail.

Wait, What are Strong and Weak Ties?

Consider my network. It consists of family, friends, neighbors, current coworkers, former coworkers, fellow classmates, former classmates, former neighbors, and even people on Facebook who I just play games with or people on LinkedIn who I connected to, in order to get connections to others. 

My immediate family is composed, of course, of strong ties. These are people who will really do things for me, things that would require effort, or time, or expense, or some combination thereof. When I had surgery a few years ago, my parents came up and helped my husband take care of me. My closest friends can also be placed into this bucket. These are people who have paid to travel to see me, or who at least have extended their trips if they’re in town. People who’ve helped me move, or given me a place to sleep or whatever. 

Weaker ties are people like those Facebook gamer pals. I can’t ask them to help me move furniture. But I can potentially ask them to do less expensive or free things if they don’t take up too much time. I can ask them to like a photograph or share a link. I can ask them to sign an online petition (particularly if I tailor my requests well enough, and the petition site doesn’t ask for too much personal information). 

I can ask my strong ties to do this, too. But I have a lot more weak ties than I have strong ones. And so do you.

What’s the long tail?

I am sorely disappointed to report that this has nothing to do with puppies. :( 

Here’s what it’s really about. 

What happens when you Google author? 

You get over half a billion hits. 

What if you Google jespah author? 

Now the number is a little under 35,000 (as of the writing of this blog post). 

Now Google jespah trek author. 

It’s a little less than 36,000 now, and almost all of the hits on the first page belong to me or point directly to me. Not too shabby. 

The idea here is that specifics matter. They pinpoint searches. And that is what your buyers are searching for. Sure, they might start off by Googling author. But the number of hits returned is so daunting that they have exactly three choices in the matter. 

1.       Give up. Google’s too hard to use.

2.        Accept the first few hits and/or dig, dig, dig into page after page after page of results. OR –

3.   Refine their search parameters and be a lot more specific about what they are really looking for. 

Of course you want to see your buyers go for option #3, or at least #2. 

Consider this, by the way, if you’re still not convinced. Stephen King isn’t on page one of all of those hits when you Google author. Or even horror author or horror writer.  But if you Google award winning horror writer, you’ll find him.

What does this have to do with strategy?

When you know what people are searching for, you know what to consider putting into your content or at least into your profile on all of these social sites. 

It might even – combined with your buyer persona research – help you get a handle on which sites to start with and emphasize the most.

What do I do?

I write mostly Star Trek fan fiction although I write other things. But my initial audience comes from there. Hence I list Star Trek or fan fiction (or fanfiction) in my profiles. Look at my two Twitter accounts, @shrinkingjes and @jespahTrekFanFI . What is in the rather limited profiles? Is it searchable? Does it make sense in the context of these two somewhat different accounts? 

The link and YouTube are both for class work which is not perfectly on point but they’re pretty close. The image is a list of the most persuasive words. Pretty interesting, eh? 

Did this chapter help you? Did it hold your interest? Do you want to see more? Then please vote! You know the puppy wants you to. ;) Don’t forget to look at my Twitter examples. Share in the comments below the kinds of areas you want to emphasize in your profiles.