Our fractured social media environment with its algorithms and volatility makes authors, and other creative small business people, feel as if they have to be on all the platforms all the time. And yet, even longer than ten years ago, the idea of being everywhere simply was untenable. If you wanted to have time to write, you had to draw the line somewhere. But where do you draw it?
Today, it’s even more important to create some boundaries around social media, not just to prevent burnout and for time management, but often for your own mental health. There’s a fine line between staying informed, staying aware, and droomscrolling. That line exists in a different way for every individual, and often where it lives differs from day to day depending on the news cycle.
How do you decide where to be on social media?
The business marketers and internet gurus will tell you to be where your readers are, and there’s some truth to that. But also let me be frank, if the algorithms don’t show your post to a substantial amount of people, then how do you know where your readers really are. I don’t know about you, but I can sniff a “can you help me market my business/create products to sell to you” email from a business couched as a helpful question (“What’s your biggest challenge…” is a common one taught by business coaches and it stinks of shallow engagement bait.)
I propose a different method.
Where do you want to be? What platform gives you an uplift of engagement about things that are meaningful to you. (I’m assuming here that some aspect of your writing is meaningful to you. If you’re just churning out word count to market like a widget, then treat your work like a widget, and I’m not the coach for that.)
Personally, I like a platform where I can talk about my books, of course, but also talk about my interests, what I’m learning/reading about, or the books I’m reading, the tv shows I’m watching, etc… If I can’t bring my whole self into a space, then it becomes meaningless to me. And that’s why for me Facebook and Instagram just don’t cut it. I need the kind of feed and interaction I can get when a corporate overlord doesn’t control the algorithm.
I hang out on Bluesky and Mastodon.
Adding A New Platform
I’m thinking about this topic because I’m a member of easily a dozen or more discord servers. And honesty time–having social anxiety means that it can be very difficult to actually enter into a conversation with strangers. Though all the servers are writing-related servers and so I know that we do have that in common.
Again, I encourage you to start slow. I have picked a couple of discord servers in which I try to pop in and if not follow every conversation then at least say “hi” and interact on a weekly basis. Only when I am interacting on a single server on a regular basis will I think about adding more. It may be a slower way to build community and engagement, but also, it feels much more manageable.
Final Thoughts
You’re never going to be everywhere, and while discoverability is a big problem for authors, there’s no guarantee that even if you were on every single platform that you would be seen by the algorithms. Instead by focusing where you feel comfortable and where you can build deep and meaningful engagement, you’ll be able to cultivate an audience and create engagement in a way that works for you.