I was told over and over and over again, “You need to build your brand!” It’s suspiciously vague business lingo that roughly translates as, “You’ll need to sell your introverted soul on this dotted line here.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Really what it means is that if you are out to sell something, let’s say a book you wrote, you need to have a massive online presence. The more social media sites you are active on the better, the more eyes there will be to see your message. But be careful! It’s a cesspool out there, don’t be too successful or one wrong word in the wrong place could spell your doom. But no pressure! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So in preparation of my book release I created a FaceBook business page for both the book and for my pen name, the latter of which I’d share everything with including blog posts and other writing. I also joined Twitter! And Instagram! And I started to really learn WordPress, trying to find other bloggers so I could comment on their writing. You see social media is completely useless if all you do is post link after link reading, “Buy my book!” No one <\/em>will follow you if you’re that guy (or woman.) The point of social media is to be social. <\/em>I know, those be fightin’ words to an introvert like myself. Truth be told I suck at making friends and am even worse at pitching sales to perfect strangers. I remember when I was knee high to a grasshopper bringing home school fundraising ploys. Whether it was wrapping paper, fun runs, or Girl Scout cookies my sales report always read “1” which was always my mother. In adulthood I have found I have an even harder time… because generally people don’t succumb to guilt sales when I randomly start sobbing anymore. And that’s the only tool I had! <\/p>\n\n\n\n I hate to say it but social media isn’t much easier for me. My first Twitter account was just sad. I didn’t get it at all and would basically just show up every few days and post some silly little thought of mine and leave. After a year I had 73 followers. My second Twitter account, under the penname I chose, fared a little better. I decided to randomly reply to any questions I had answers for. This had mixed results. I still hadn’t made any genuine connections, save for one person. However I was getting more followers and my funny little thoughts seemed to be making people laugh so that was good. I have been active on the account for a few months now and I am up to almost 400 followers. I learned I could artificially inflate this number by begging for attention from the #WritingCommunity but I want people to follow me because they genuinely have a vested interest in what I have to say not out of sheer solidarity. I have also learned to make very obvious jokes on other people’s threads, always accompanied by an emoji so no one thinks I’m being serious. And funny enough people are starting to talk back! I am actually enjoying it! <\/p>\n\n\n\n FaceBook is less social. I throw links up of everything I write, hash tag them, and leave them to float around like dead leaves in a swimming pool. This has bolstered my traffic and only continues to do so. Instagram was fun to share my beautiful travel photos on but hasn’t driven any traffic to my writing or garnered any real connections. I am very slowly learning how to conduct myself but whew! It’s tiring! And as much as I enjoy it (I really do love meeting people) I doubt I would have any of these accounts if I weren’t trying to sell something – which I do very poorly at because again, I hate being that dick that walks into a room and yells, “HEY! I got shit to buy! PLEASE come check it out!” Especially when it’s a memoir about my life. I’d sort of rather die… <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Introverts make for terrible sales people. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[19,30,29,32,34,35,31,28,33],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-promotion-books","tag-book-promotion","tag-brand","tag-building-your-brand","tag-facebook","tag-instagram","tag-platform-building","tag-selling-your-book","tag-social-media","tag-twitter","wpcat-2-id","wpcat-5-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/04\/20.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRChu-t","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/30"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}