Marketing for Writers: Instagram

Once again,

I’m back to let you know that

I have no idea what I’m doing on a social media platform and if you’d like to skip this week I would completely understand. If you’ve made it past that prior sentence, then I hope you enjoy some tips I’ve found during my research into how to build your Instagram following.

Your first question might be, why should writers care about cultivating an Instagram page? The other day at my day job, I was training an intern from a local high school on how to post things to our website and then linking them to our Facebook page. I asked if she had much experience with Facebook and she said no, no one her age really uses Facebook these days. She said it’s mainly Snapchat and Instagram these days. I felt very old at that moment. I remember when Facebook first started, and people were embarrassed that their grandmother was following them on Facebook. Apparently, it wasn’t cool to have your grandmother knowing about that wicked party on the college quad last Friday. Turns out I am now an Instagram grandmother. The point of that story is that if you want to get your name out there as a writer, you have to be able to diversify yourself and use as many tools as you can. Facebook, Instagram, even Tiktok are examples of the many social media tools that writers have available. And they’re free to use. If you’re a writer, “free” is something that can’t be passed up. The only thing you need to do is put in a little bit of effort.

I start this week, Saturday, Feb. 17, with 652 followers. If you’d like to follow me, you can find me on Instagram @james.the.master (pretty good handle, am I right?). Statistically, out of those 652 accounts, 60.8% of them are women and 39.1% are men. Out of those people, more than half of them are in the age ranges of 25-44. Oddly enough, the top location of my followers is Lagos, with 4.6% while my hometown of Plymouth is at 4%. By the way, that’s Lagos in Nigeria. Apparently, all those princes over there really like my columns. Who knew?!

The reason why I’m relaying all of those statistics is because you have to know your audience. The first tip I have doesn’t really come from any website or expert, just myself. Instagram does an incredible job compiling all that information about your followers into an easy to read and digestible page. For the most part, my Instagram doesn’t really focus on one subject or another. It’s got books reviews, movie reviews, my general life, video games, Magic: the Gathering, and other nerd culture. Now, if I were to radically shift that focus and change to strictly just books and writing culture, I could track my followers over a course of a week, two weeks, a month, or even the last 90 days to see if I lose or gain followers. Here’s some other tips from some actual experts. Use Instagram Stories. Stories are videos and images that are located at the top of your profile for 24 hours. Apparently, from the site I’ll cite at the bottom of this article, Instagram stories have high engagement rates, with popular accounts boasting over a 92 percent completion rate. Apparently, when you reach that coveted 10,000 follower milestone, you gain access to a “swipe up” feature where followers are taken to a link of your choosing outside of Instagram. That would be useful when you want to redirect people to your author website or your Amazon page.

Use the right hashtags. Hashtags help boost the growth of a profile by making it easier for readers to find. For example, if someone were to search Instagram for #Masteringthecraft, you’ll find my posts about the current column (You’ll have to scroll for it, but they’re there).

Keep it Relevant. As I’m doing this research, I’ve discovered that I’m doing it all wrong. I’m spreading myself too thin. The website at the bottom states that “You want to keep things relevant to your intentions, which I assume (since you’re a writer) have something to do with your writing.” If you have a lot of different interests, don’t worry about it. Just make a different account. I’ve seen many content creators with two or three different channels and/or profiles that have varying focuses.

Be Consistent. This is something that’s pretty common when you’re looking for tips for increasing any social media platform. No one wants to follow an account that only posts once in a blue moon. They want to be kept up to date

with you. What’s the incentive for your followers if you’re not posting consistently? One of the things I’ve learned is that you can spend an hour at the beginning of the week and spread out your content by scheduling it throughout the week. That way you aren’t killing yourself every day trying to pump out content.

The last tip I’ll convey is similar to one a few weeks ago. That’s to use Linktree. Linktree is a handy link sharing program that allows you to have one link in your Instagram profile that will send people to a list of all of your social media websites, resources, and other links.

I hope that helps a little bit. I’ll be working on implementing all of these things and more so hopefully when I report in next time, I’ll have more than 652 followers. Until then, keep calm and write on! Website citation:

Instagram for Writers [2023]: How to Get the Most out of It (kindlepreneur.com)