Focus on the quality of your connections, not on the numbers

I’ve been doing quite a bit of training lately, both on my Secrets of Social Media Success online course and yesterday at the school where I myself trained as a coach. Yesterday afternoon I spent a full half-day training eight business coaches on how to use social media not only for their own businesses, but to help their clients. And one thing kept coming up over and over: quality over quantity.

I know it’s tricky when you’re first starting out on social media. You’ve just set up a Facebook page to share information about your books and to connect with your readers. You invite all of your friends and family, and a few of them click over to like your page. So you’ve got some basic numbers, but it still looks dismal. And there’s no engagement: no one shares your posts; no one comments on them.

Or maybe you just got started on Twitter. You’re following a few people, but no one is following you back. No one retweets you; no one strikes up a conversation with you.

And so it’s tempting to purchase likes or followers. I always recommend against this: first of all, it’s not authentic. Buy purchasing likes or followers, you’re creating a fake tribe. Secondly, you’re buying generic likes or follows from people who are most likely not interested in buying your books.

So why are you on social media, anyway?

Are you on Twitter and Facebook to rack up numbers, or are you there to engage with your readers and to sell more books? I’m going to assume that your answer is the latter, so let’s pay attention to how you can do just that: by focusing on connecting with people who are likely to read your books.

I say this all the time, and I’m going to say it again: focus on your target market of readers. It’s perfectly fine to connect with other authors, as you may find it helpful to join that community and get useful tips on writing and publishing. But connecting with random people is an ineffective strategy, if you can even call it a strategy at all.

Social media is all about person-to-person connections. You should be looking to create valuable relationships and to build your network of readers. Because they’re the ones who will purchase your books and who will recommend you to others.

Do you ever find yourself getting caught in the numbers game?

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