Social Media Differences (Podcast vs Book)

By now it is no secret that in addition to writing books, playing games, enjoying movies, and working that I also co-host a podcast called Nerd Sh!t with one of my sons. Now, I won't go on about what that podcast is or anything, although the name should give you a good idea. Instead, I want to discuss marketing the podcast versus marketing my books on two popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

When I started, the first real introduction I had to marketing was creating the Facebook page for my author profile. This was done months before the book was actually released but only after I had started the publishing process with my previous publisher Newman Springs. At that point, I felt reasonably secure that the book would reach retail and knew that marketing would be a vital need once the book reached that point. And I'll be honest, I didn't know the first thing about how to market on social media. My posts were irregular. I wasn't running ads to promote my page or upcoming release. I had no way of gaining too much attention.

Over the months and years that have passed, I picked up a few tips and tricks that saw some significant growth, using the term significant loosely. I mean, I went from a dozen page lakes to a few hundred over the course of time.

When it came time to start promoting the podcast, I took much of what I had learned from marketing my books to also market the podcast. I started a Facebook page, an Instagram profile, built a website, and even created a YouTube channel. I immediately created some ads within the Facebook ad manager and started using the Facebook (or now Meta) Business Suite to start scheduling posts to be automatically published to the shows Facebook and Instagram pages.

Both pages continue to grow but I won't lie, the Facebook and Instagram pages for the podcast have started growing at a faster pace than my author pages had. My author pages still have more likes and followers but the podcasts' pages are off to a good start.

However, the thing that amazes me is the amount of content that I produce for each profile varies greatly. For my author page, I seem to struggle to create 3-5 posts a week whereas with the podcast I somehow manage 5 posts a day. Sure, the podcast covers a broad spectrum of topics while my author stuff focuses on my writing only but that's still an impressive game.

I have most days scheduled with 2 or more posts a day for the podcast that stretch weeks into the future but for my author page it seems to simply stutter by with posts being scheduled 1 or 2 days in advance at the most outside of recent release windows when I regularly post chapter summaries and whatnot to promote the latest book. But even then, those posts don't drive much traffic to anything compared to the traffic the podcast posts see.

I guess that at some point I will have to focus more energy in finding a more productive and steady method for developing posts for my author pages aside from my weekly blogs but I struggle with how to do it and stay on point. I don't want to flood my author page with posts of random memes, my personal opinion in real-world matters, or general tomfoolery. My author pages are about me as an author, the books I've produced or am producing, and that's it.

I would like to build up a connection with other authors so that we could use our social media to not only promote our works but the works of each other. The challenge in that becomes communication for me. I work all day talking to people so at night I don't always want to be social. How can I foster these relationships with other authors to swap details about our books to be promoted on each others' pages if I can't chat with them? I am a member of different author groups on Facebook but they often use the group as a form of marketing and not for networking. The podcast is just so much easier to promote because I have so much content laying around my office and it relates to so many topics compared to just my books.

Maybe one day I'll find the key to unlock the door to book marketing but for now its back to the grind and trying not to let the much fuller schedule of posts for our podcast discourage me while I'm looking at the largely empty schedule for my books. :-(

Do you want to learn more about Nerd Sh!t? Check out our website, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Find out all of the streaming service sites where you can listen to Nerd Sh!t.

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