Building A Social Media Strategy
Because writing that isn't promoted is writing that isn't read.
I'VE STARTED WORKING on a social media strategy for Horror × Hope, and I wanted to share my current approach in case a) it helps anyone else who's trying to figure this stuff out, and b) anyone who's farther along in this journey has interesting feedback or experience I can learn from.
A caveat: I mainly want to be an author, not a “content creator”, so while I'm looking to leverage social media to help get my work out there, I'm not looking to become some viral internet personality or terminally-online influencer.
I would, however, like to actually be read.
Content beats
Short-form social media has become very visual-centric, so I’ve been focusing on ways to adapt my stories into attractive images that might stop the scroll. Cover images are the most obvious:
Despite never having previously considered myself a visual artist, I’ve found I really enjoy making these. Switching to Affinity has a lot to do with it. I’ve also been doing photo manipulation and compositing—for which the free stock image library at Pexels has given me some super helpful starting points—and I’m finding that workflow a better match for my particular brain than attempting pure illustration from a blank page. (Notably, I am not using any form of generative AI, because fuck that noise.)
Once I have a cover, I make a stylized mask for a cover reveal teaser:
I repurpose foundational elements from the cover to create visually-related excerpt images:
And to give myself one more content beat, I’m also experimenting with “opening line” excerpts in similar fashion:
I’ve been trickling these beats out on a two-day cadence:
- Teaser on Wednesday
- Cover on Friday (when the story goes live)
- Opening line on Monday
- Excerpt on Wednesday
- ICYMI the following Friday
The ICYMI (“in case you missed it”) is meant to aggregate all three images—the cover, the opening line, and the excerpt—into a final carousel that wraps up the campaign.
Since I'm currently promoting short fiction, these launch campaigns are pretty short. If and when I'm promoting a book, they’ll get longer.
Platforms
I’ve established Horror × Hope social accounts on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and the Fediverse. I’m also considering Substack Notes part of the short-form social media roster. Each platform has its differences, which I’m trying to manage with intent.
Bluesky
Bluesky has the shortest message length limit, and hashtags are still meaningful, especially for sorting posts into custom feeds like BookSky and HorrorSky.
The bookish community on Bluesky is pretty robust, if perhaps a bit more tilted toward authors than readers (or maybe that's just my corner of it so far). I feel like I'm finding more folks I identify with here than on the other platforms.
Instagram uses a portrait image aspect ratio instead of landscape, and it uses an even taller aspect ratio for stories than it does for posts, all of which is super irritating. Crops of landscape content look bad, so I'm adapting all my landscape images into portrait versions specifically for Instagram:
Instagram has a further irritant in that URLs in posts are not clickable, making posts a poor vehicle for promotional content. Additionally, posts seem to get presented according to the whims of the algorithm and with almost no consideration to recency, so reposting content for additional reach seems fairly pointless and just contributes to my profile page looking spammy.
Instagram stories are a more functional vehicle for promotion since they can have off-site links attached, so I've been using those primarily, and then making one non-story post per unique content beat so my profile page aggregates all my art pieces without repetition.
After doing this for a few weeks, I just read this excellent post which drew my attention to the fact that stories are only shown to followers—unless, presumably, they're paid ads—so they're not doing anything for me in terms of audience growth, which means I'm probably going to need to rethink this strategy a bit.
Threads
Threads uses topics—one per post—instead of hashtags. I've been going with “horror” for my horror fiction thus far, but I have no idea yet if that's the “best” topic or if I should be drilling down to something more niche.
Otherwise, I'm treating Threads pretty much the same as Bluesky right now, since the post formats are so similar.
The link between Instagram and Threads feels really weird and fuzzy to me. It routinely recommends I follow people on one who I already follow on the other, and I get followers on one that already follow me on the other. It's not clear whether Meta wants them to be two separate networks, two separate ways of engaging with the same network, or some unknown third thing.
The Fediverse
I've long been a proponent of Mastodon and the social web in general, so I feel right at home here.
Horror × Hope joins the Fediverse via Ghost, whose integration works like a combination of Mastodon and Substack Notes. The post format is effectively identical to Bluesky, and I'm currently treating both platforms similarly.
Fediverse handle: @hxh@horrorxhope.com
Substack Notes
Horror × Hope is canonically hosted on Ghost, but it's also syndicated to Substack for additional reach. “Notes” is Substack's short-form social media channel, which is separate from newsletters. It works similarly to Bluesky in terms of its post format, except for that Substack Notes don't use hashtags. Otherwise, I've been treating them pretty much the same.
One key difference is that my Substack account and my Substack publication aren't the same thing: Horror × Hope is my publication, while my account—which is what Notes posts show up from—is just me. Consequently, I've been a little looser in voice and topics than on the other platforms.
Automation
I’m coordinating all of this with Buffer, which lets me schedule out all my Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads posts for a week or two all at once. I still have to post to the Fediverse (via Ghost) and Substack Notes manually, but I’ve set up notifications for when Buffer sends posts on the other networks, and that serves as an easy reminder for me to hit those two. (I recognize I could probably automate the other platforms with Zapier or something, but it hasn't bothered me enough to actually do that yet.)
Even with automation, driving this social media strategy is still a lot of work, particularly the content creation side. I’m rapidly developing a whole new kind of respect for the professional social media managers and marketers out there.
Engagement
Here's how many engagements—likes, comments, reposts, and mentions—I got on each platform in November:
- Bluesky: 115
- Substack Notes: 61
- Fediverse: 60
- Instagram: 24
- Threads: 10
I only tallied engagements on posts I authored; this includes quote posts, but excludes reposts where I didn't add my own commentary.
Anecdotally, I feel like I've seen stronger engagement when I post about others’ content than when I post about my own. This could be because their content is more interesting than mine, or it could be that they have a more established audience in terms of algorithmic reach, or it could be some secret third thing… or all of the above!
I'm trying not to worry too much about the metrics at this early stage, since it's not rational to expect hundreds of engaged followers to appear out of thin air within the first few weeks. I'll also note that I haven't done any offline promotion yet; the conventions and community events I've attended this year have all been on behalf of Shiraki Press, so there's virtually no external traffic at the moment. That's an area I'll be working on more as we get into next year.
Ethics
Almost every social media platform has some questionable ethics going on somewhere in their business. Like the famous saying “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”, I feel it's equally true that there is no avoiding 100% of the bad actors and harmful secondary effects unless you simply opt out of participation in online culture altogether.
Meta is at the top of the list of offenders, and I feel conflicted at my own presence on their platforms. The flip-side is they've simply got the biggest audience. But their audience doesn't necessarily translate to my audience: my engagement on both Instagram and Threads is significantly lower than everywhere else, and it's really hard—by design—to get folks to click away from Instagram to my site, which raises some pointed questions about the value proposition vs. the ethics of the thing.
Substack has had its own share of controversy around its refusal to de-platform its most unsavory publishers. I mentioned earlier that Ghost, not Substack, is my primary, canonical platform, and that's not an accident. But I'm also syndicating my long-form content on Substack, and it's growing faster there than on Ghost, despite all my social media promotions exclusively linking to Ghost.
If I didn't have to contend with the inconvenient realities of a complex world, I'd prefer to live exclusively on Ghost and the Fediverse, and I’d sleep very soundly at night. But I’m working hard toward my writing contributing meaningfully to paying our cost of living—because we still have to survive under capitalism—and I can't make that math work without having some amount of messy contact with the broader world, including with people and platforms I don't 100% align with. Until we replace capitalism with a more humanistic system, I don't see that unfortunate reality changing any time soon.
Future work
I'm spread too thin across all these platforms right now, but the idea has been to start wide, get some data, then cull down to what works.
I’ve already culled Medium, for instance, when it became apparent they weren't even serving my posts: I got a grand total of eleven presentations—not engagements, not even views, just presentations—in an entire month, which is so far below even my most modest expectations as to make the whole platform pointless.
For Instagram, I'm thinking about trying more robust post carousels that bring more story content on-platform and reduce the need for off-site links, with the idea being to increase follower count with more holistic content and then use stories to direct followers over to Ghost for email sign-up. I’ve also seen folks use tools like Manychat to do the “DM me for a link” thing, which I kind of hate from a user perspective, but Meta seems hell-bent on destroying every single method of sharing off-site content that doesn’t involve them putting their hand in your wallet, so we’re inundated with these gross workarounds.
I'm very skeptical right now that Threads is going to survive for long. As a user, I hate the platform and its in-your-face algorithm, and as a creator, I find the value proposition confusing and its distinction from Instagram extremely muddy.
I've been told I should try Tumblr, which I've made an account for but haven't started using. I also feel like the Tumblr community has a unique vibe and requires a very different content strategy.
I'd be remiss not to mention that Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok are the elephants in the room, because everything is television now. I'm thoroughly uninterested in spending all my time creating videos, though, so I don't expect movement on that front any time soon. Maybe that's marketing suicide, but if the written word can't exist without videos, then the written word is already dead.
Your turn
I’m interested to hear about your experiences with social media! How do you think about your own social media presence? Do you have a defined strategy, or do you post based on vibes? Where do you feel like you’ve found the most success?
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