Online Self-Promotion 101

Posted: November 7th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Media And Advertising | Comments

I know a lot of talented writers who spend most of their time creating, and are not particularly followers of, or even interested in, the world of social media. Once in a while, one of these talented offline people will get something published online. Galvanized by the idea that more pageviews is better, they clumsily attempt to make their content popular by sending emails to their friends, asking them to read it. Maybe they also instant message another set of friends, asking people in their life, one at a time, to patronize the site in question. This process is tedious, labor-intensive, and makes the person doing it feel like he or she is selling used cars. No one with a conscience or a desire to keep their friends can do it for very long. So they stop.

Understanding what to do instead requires a paradigm shift. Many of us who were born before 1985 (myself included) tend to get stuck on the idea that, if you want somebody to do something, then you need to directly ask them to do it. It makes intuitive sense, and millions of years of experience bear it out, but due to the magic of the Internet, it’s quite often just not the case anymore.

On the web, your audience, by and large, finds you, and not the other way around. This is true of that part of your audience that is made up entirely of strangers. But it’s also true of the audience made up of your friends.

The short version: when you get something published online, share a link to it on Facebook, tweet a link to it on Twitter, and tease it on your blog by writing a short description and possibly even posting the first paragraph or so, along with a link to the rest. If you already know this much, as most readers of this blog probably do, then stay tuned for the follow-up “self-promotion 201″ post.

Here’s a typical conversation between me and someone who thinks, say, Twitter is stupid and pointless. To help the other person save face, let’s call them B, and to provide a false sense of modesty, let’s call their interlocutor A.

A: Do you have a Twitter account yet?

B: Twitter is stupid. I don’t get it.

A: If you don’t get it, how do you know it’s stupid?

B: It just seems like a waste of time. What would I tweet?

A: You could tweet, for example, that you’re really excited about the TV show you’re watching.

B: But why should anyone care about that?

A: Don’t you sometimes tell your friends about the stupid stuff you’re excited about, like TV shows?

B: Yes. But if I want to tell my friends that stuff, I’ll call them.

(Here comes the important part.)

A: But most of the time, your friends don’t give a shit.

B: Eh?

A: Why are you bothering people in your life with information that they might not care about? And why are you spending your own time doing it on a one-off basis?

——

So let’s take an example from my own life. A few days ago, I watched the pilot for V, the new sci-fi show. I tweeted about it. I also blogged about it. I also probably shared something about it on Facebook. Which means that, in total, about 800 or so people were exposed to the idea that I was watching V.

How many of them cared? Probably less than 20.

But that’s okay, because the rest of them didn’t feel imposed upon. My uninteresting-to-most update slid right by, along with everyone else’s, in the eyes of most of my friends who follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or my blog.

And that’s fine. It was only those 20 people that I wanted to reach anyway. Plus, I managed to do it without annoying anyone else.

Now, if I had taken half an hour to carefully construct an email, which I would then send out to a carefully constructed email list of science fiction watching friends, then how many people would I have found who were receptive to the message? A lot more than 20. But it wouldn’t be worth it, because everyone else I contacted would be annoyed, and the whole thing would have cost me too much time anyway.

And yet…

Let’s take, just for example, Revolving Floor.

The majority of the traffic is direct, meaning that people have the site bookmarked, or whatever. Fine, those people are interested in the site itself, and will keep checking in, just to see what’s new.

After direct, the vast majority of the traffic comes from Facebook, followed by Twitter, followed by the personal blogs of the contributors. including this one.

Sounds logical, right? But consider this. If you take the traffic of the average contributor’s blog,  combined with how many Facebook friends the average contributor  has, combined with how many Twitter followers the average contributor has, then you’ll get a relatively big number, representing “impressions,” which is to say, the number of eyeballs that the message gets exposed to at any given time (assuming one eyeball per human).

So the question becomes, how much traffic to Revolving Floor does all that result in? In other words, what’s the “click-through rate”?

Suffice it to say that it’s small. No matter how popular you are, your fans can’t pay attention to every little thing you do. When you share a link with your social media connections, the majority of them are going to ignore it.

Which leads us to the next question. The people who ignored the link you shared on Facebook… are they mad that you shared it? Were they annoyed that you imposed, or tried to impose, on their time and attention?

Not likely, unless you sit there and do nothing else all day. The attrition rate for, say, the Revolving Floor Facebook fan page, is extremely low. Most of the 270 or so people who have become fans are still fans now. Granted, some of them probably became fans because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, and then they turned off the updates. But so what? They only have to do that once. And the @revolvingfloor follower count slowly but steadily increases, even though the click-through rate on any given tweeted link is about as low as it would be in any other situation. In other words, the majority of the time, most people aren’t interested. But, generally speaking, they aren’t disinterested enough to stop receiving the updates. Similarly, RSS subscriptions continue to grow, even during periods of relatively low web traffic. In other words, people continue to accept the updates, even when they blend in with the white noise of social media that increasingly makes up the majority of many people’s daily lives.

In other words, the goal is to please some of the people, all of the time. But it’s a different set of people each time, and the non-pleased people aren’t displeased, they’re just busy. And they’ll probably be pleased again, sooner or later.

Of course, you should only promote content that you genuinely think deserves promotion. But if you are the one who created it, then presumably – hopefully – you want it to get more exposure. Fortunately, this wild and crazy modern world offers you tools to do so without seeming pushy.

---