Conversation Starters That Boost Social Media Engagement

EPISODE SIX

Jenn answers a common question she has received from authors over the years about how they can best build their social media engagement.

If you feel like your social media posts fall on deaf ears, you're not alone. Many authors struggle with figuring out how to create engaging content and start conversations online. Here are three tips to jump start your engagement on social media.

• Identify 3-4 topics besides writing and your books that you want to connect with your readers on.

• Grab people’s attention with a relevant question that only requires a one- or two-word answer for them to respond.

• Initiate conversations on other people’s posts by using hashtags to find conversations that interest you.

Links

“70 Conversation Starters for Social Media Engagement”

Transcript

JENN: Welcome to episode six of the Book Marketing Simplified podcast. I'm Jenn Hanson-dePaula.

MARCUS: And this is Marcus dePaula, and today we want to talk about a topic that I noticed was something that was a popular search result that people were looking for. According to our website analytics, it brings them to a blog post of yours that you wrote back in 2018 called "70 Conversation Starters for Social Media Engagement," and the keywords that they're finding our website through are "conversation starters." I thought that was an interesting topic to discuss. What prompted you to actually write that article in 2018?

JENN: I had received many comments and DMS and questions from people asking, "how do you build engagement?" Like they didn't necessarily know how to start those conversations. And I think that so many of us overthink the process and we think that we need to have some sort of complicated conversation in order for people to join when it's actually exactly the opposite.

So what started that idea was giving authors some prompts that they can run with. It's funny because at first I thought, "I'll do, you know, 10 or so." And then I just got on a roll. They kept coming and coming and coming, and so I ended up with 70. It's like, "well, there you go. That's a good amount." But they are questions that are kind of, not completely random, but they aren't questions that you might necessarily think, "Oh, these could start a conversation, or these could provide a quick answer that readers could contribute to" because that's what you're looking for when you're looking for these conversation starters. Something that just takes a few seconds to respond to.

MARCUS: You mentioned this in the blog post that because of the way the social media algorithms work - and I don't want to get too deep into the technical aspects of how algorithms work - but just know that the algorithms will show your posts more on other people's feeds if you have people commenting on them. That's like the most powerful level of engagement that the algorithm responds positively to. So these quick questions that you came up with - ideas for authors to use - the purpose of them is to try to help people boost their visibility of their posts through getting people to comment on it with short responses.

JENN: And they don't necessarily have to be about books or about your book or about reading or anything like that. That is something that I think so many authors get kind of stuck in. They think, "I can only talk about my book. I can only promote it, or it has to be something about reading or writing."

MARCUS: Do you think that comes from the mindset of, okay, "I'm using this social media platform purely as a promotional marketing tool?"

JENN: Absolutely. That's a mindset adjustment that authors need to make. Social media is about connecting with your readers. It's not the best thing to use as promotion. You can talk about your book, you can promote it every once in a while, but that is not its main purpose. The main purpose of social media is just that it's social. 

MARCUS: Right. And it's having these conversations, which is what we talked about today.

JENN: Yes. And it's about connecting with people on a human level. One of the questions was, "do you prefer listening to music on CD, record,..." 

MARCUS: "...vinyl or streaming?"

JENN: Yeah. How do you like to listen to music? And that brings up - people start saying, "Oh, I love listening to classic rock on vinyl." It just kind of peels away layers of other things that you can talk about and you create these great conversations and connections with people that you might not have had otherwise. 

MARCUS: And especially if people don't know anything about you as an author or what your books are about, it's easier to get them to start talking about something that they can relate to you on, which oftentimes is not your writing. 

JENN: Well, and it's also not initiating a connection out of the desire of a sale. When people can connect with you on things that you have in common. Or things that you have similar interests in and you can connect as a human being rather than as an author trying to push the sale of a book, you have a much better chance of turning that mere connection into an actual fan when you can relate to them. When you have this know, like, and trust factor that you can build up. Not constantly pushing the sale of your book, but rather through connecting with them as a human being. 

MARCUS: There's an idea that you use as a metaphor that you came up with for part of your coaching process that I really like and I think about all the time as I'm trying to come up with posts and interact with people on social media for myself. And it's the idea of treating it like a cocktail party, to where you're in a room with a bunch of people and you go up to a group of people and you don't just say, "hi, I'm Marcus. By my book!" So these conversation starters are the best example of that. You know, "are you a cat or a dog person?" And that sort of thing.

JENN: I think that when we have a computer screen between us and another person, and we don't actually see them there is that disconnect that you're not actually connecting with a human being. It's about keeping that mindset, like with the cocktail party, you walk in and you may know a few people, but you probably don't know everyone. And so you use that time to get to know people. You don't go to a cocktail party to sell. You go there to connect. And that is very much the mindset that we need when we're connecting with others on social media, even though there's a computer between us, it doesn't minimize the fact that there's a human being on the other side of that screen. 

MARCUS: That we're actually wanting to connect with, not just get money out of. So what's the approach on being able to grab people's attention with these conversation starter posts?

JENN: When we can create posts that require just a one or two word response or asking people to respond with an emoji. It's something that people can do very quickly. Because people are scrolling very quickly through the feed. If they see something that grabs their attention, you're not going to get a lot of people responding if it requires a very long answer. So prompting people with a question that's very easy to answer, that can require just a little bit of thought, and that's kind of fun. Those are always responses that people are very willing to take part in. 

MARCUS: So a good example of that would be, "what are you reading right now?" 

JENN: Yeah. That or maybe, "what's your favorite book that you've read in the past two months?" Or "what is a new band that you've discovered?" Or "what do you listen to while you're working?" That kind of thing. People want to contribute. They want to be a part of a community. If they feel like they can help you with some insight, people are all over that. And they feel good. Like when someone says, "Oh that's a great idea! I never thought of that."

MARCUS: All right, so we talked about finding conversation starters that don't relate to your book so that you can get people to engage with you. Then also making those conversation starters a question that requires a short answer. Besides creating these posts that start conversations. What are some other things you can do to start conversations on social media?

JENN: I think many authors think that if they get responses on their own posts, that that's going to be enough. It's not your reader's job to find you. It's your job to find your readers. And one of the best ways to do that is to contribute to other people's posts. So something that you can use hashtags for is to find certain topics that you can join. Let's say you write science fiction romance, so there's a hashtag #scifiromance. You go and search that and you can see other people's posts about that particular topic, and you can go in and start commenting and liking and sharing those posts. So you are introducing yourself to other people by leaving other comments. And that builds up your visibility, because people see what you're commenting, they go and check out your profile. That's actually a topic that we're going to dig deeper into in the next episode, so stay tuned for that. 

MARCUS: Setting you up for the next one. And I want to point out too, that just like we've mentioned before, if you go into this with the sales mindset, it's not going to work as well - if you actually start to engage with these posts on an authentic level, things that actually interests you and things that you have something to say and you're not just trying to manipulate things to point to your profile. 

JENN: Yes. And people can smell that a mile away. You might think you're being sly going in and saying, "Hey, I also wrote a book that's now available." You know, it's like a bunch of marketing copy. No, that's not the way to do it. Going in just to leave a comment saying, "Oh, I read that book. It's fantastic." Something as simple as that. Engage with people in a non promotional way. 

MARCUS: In a meaningful way. 

JENN: Exactly.

MARCUS: So what's the "make it happen moment" for this episode? 

JENN: What I would encourage you to do is to think of three or four different topics that you can talk about besides your book. Maybe it's a hobby of yours, maybe it's... 

MARCUS: ...your pets, music...

JENN: Yeah. It's thinking about things that you are genuinely interested in that you can start prompting people with some sort of call to action in all of your posts to encourage that feedback. And something really quick that you can try is saying, "what emoji do you feel represents what you're feeling right now?" I've discovered so many emojis that I didn't even know existed. 

MARCUS: I've seen you post that before 

JENN: Yes. It's fun. And I think using that as just an initial step into creating conversations online. So thinking of three to four topics that you can talk about to initiate conversations. 

MARCUS: And if you need help getting ideas, go to the blog post that we mentioned, "70 Conversation Starters for Social Media Engagement," which we'll have a link to that in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at bookmarketingsimplified.com/6. And as always, we also want to hear from you, so let us know how things are going for you in the comments on our website, on social media, email, however you want to reach out to us.

JENN: So that's it for this episode. We are so thankful that you're listening and we hope that you find this helpful. Until next time! 

MARCUS: Thanks.