The Biggest Author Social Media Mistake

Are You Even Marketing, Bruh?

Leveraging Addiction.

Ah, dopamine, you sultry little bitch.

Everything you interact with - be it apps, websites, social media feeds, groups, or whatever digital siren-song is in your ear at the moment - one thing is certain:

It is built to toy with your brain, and keep you.

Jingling coins on your favorite game app.

Quick-hit feeds of mindless entertainment.

Apps that remind you on your phone that you have not interacted with them lately.

Notifications, alerts, those irritating little badges …

I see what you’re doing, X …

It’s enough to make you feel like this …

We get it, Jim. We do.

I wrote about this recently in my BRANDING CASE STUDY. (Click it, read it, do it.)

We are indeed competing for attention on the socials, but what you also have to realize is that the socials are competing with each other for your attention as well, and there is some deep psychology behind it.

Tech Companies Don’t Care About You.

You are a commodity to tech companies. They want your browsing habits, shopping habits, and attention 24/7 to sell advertising, get commissions, and increase the time spent on their apps.

This is why they throttle posts with outside links. They don’t want you leaving the platform.

This is why they ask you for fully unlocked permissions. They want more access to you than their competitors.

This is why the ask you to allow all photographs, allow control of your camera and phone, and basically tell you to kneel, close your eyes, and open your mouth, because here comes the internet. (Vulgar, but most people just do it without a second thought, you naughty little minxes you.)

Building Socials The “Right Way.”

I plucked this one from Elevated Marketing Solutions, but you can pretty much see this sort of thing anywhere and everywhere during discussions about branding and presenting yourself on social media:

The thing about our digital lives, my friends, is that we can’t really do much about these “necessary” apps that we use to market ourselves and generally depend on to live our lives.

But we can sniff out a single person who is taking advantage of us in the same way.

Tech companies like X, META, TikTok, etc. have a huge advantage. They’re so huge, with so many users, that there’s nobody to complain to. Sure, you can rage about them on the internet, but nobody really cares. Remember, you’re a commodity. Writing a letter to a tech company about how you don’t like their policies is like a grain of salt writing a letter to you because it doesn’t like being in your table’s salt shaker.

You don’t care. You’re going to sprinkle that bastard on your steamed veggies and eat it anyway. It’s opinion as a single grain doesn’t matter …

Where Authors Get It Wrong.

There’s a great way to grow your social presence on X, Facebook, BlueSky (gross, don’t go there), etc.

Engagement bait. Rage bait. Anything with “bait.”

“Are you a Plotter or a Pantser!?”

“What do you think about trad pub!?”

“Can you be a writer if you don’t read?”

And here’s the thing about all of these questions - they’re annoying as hell.

There is no value proposition in any of this. So what you’ll end up with is a bunch of new followers who are following you because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. But you’re not offering anything of value, you aren’t building any relationships, you’re playing the Tech Company game …

You see your follower count go up. You get the dopamine hit. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Do any of these people care about you? No.

Now, if the rage bait ends up being something political or highly charged, sure, you’ll find like minds and probably have an engaged follower 1 out of 10. But otherwise, you’re wasting time posting this stuff, wasting effort, and chewing up the empty calories your dopamine is providing you.

Be Of Value.

It’s not that hard, and don’t sit there and tell me you don’t have something interesting to say, or an interesting experience someone could learn from. We all do, and that’s where you start to build genuine connections in the community.

Is it fast? No.

Does it give you that super-duper dopamine hit of a rage bait-y post that gets you a pile of new subs (half of which are likely bots) in a few hours? Also no.

Will it actually get you connecting with people who will have your back, amplify you in return, and have you both doing things the right way to build your brand and be seen as a resource instead of a random bait poster?

Yup.

We call this “Starting With Service.” Be of service to the community, and the community will be of service back.

And if you can’t manage to do that, or you don’t want to, then my latest song is for you …

‘Til next time, folks. Behave out there …