January has been a month of massive learning.
I set myself quite a long ‘to do’ list for the year, which including great chunks of writing, I planned to learn more about marketing. This means taking myself right out of my comfort zone. I consider myself a typical crab who is happy to hide inside her shell. As a published author who needs to spread the word, this isn’t good or effective.
From day one, I took the plunge and signed up for a 30 Day Social Media Challenge. The idea being to learn how to engage better with my followers on my Author Face Book Page.
I have found it to be much more of a learning curve than I expected. Although I knew the final challenge at the end would be my most difficult.
During the month I have learnt to engage with my audience in an open and at times deeply honest manner than I ever anticipated. I began sharing thoughts and moments of my life that I would not have shared in a public domain before. Part of the learning was to realise that people want to know the story behind the stories. I will endeavour to give more of that from now on.
One particular post that I found extremely difficult was where I had to ask people to describe me in one word. This could have been quite confronting I didn’t know what to expect, however the response was awesome. Surprisingly this post had the highest engagement and the most comments from all my posts of the month. I was deeply honoured and humbled that people took the time to leave lovely comments using wonderful descriptive words like : achiever, focused, talented, resilient, inspiring and genuine. For the full amazing response the link is here -
Interestingly another post that had a lot of attention was my one about the inspiration behind the writing of my chapter book, ‘Secrets Hidden Below.’ I really appreciate the interest this was given and will continue to write small bits of information about the book’s journey to eventual publication.
As I have already mentioned the final task was without a doubt the hardest. It was spread over two posts to ease us into it. The first one took me so far out of my comfort zone I couldn’t believe I did it. Being asked to put myself on camera in a photo is hard enough, but to expose myself on a video, I didn’t think I could do that. I found it to be one of the most nerve wracking experiences, but I pushed myself to do it. I decided there was no point taking on a challenge if I wasn’t going to see it through to the end.
So what did I learn from this challenge? Other than discovering I could dig deeper and be more determined than I ever thought possible? I realised that like my Picture Book character ‘Frazzled Freya,’ it is ok to come out into the midday sun and shine. I can leave my comfort zone, sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and give it a go.
Frazzled Freya had to learn to overcome her fears, as did I.
I also learnt how to schedule posts. Before the challenge I had no idea how to do this. I was surprised how simple and easy it actually was. Before the challenge I didn’t even see the need for scheduling posts. I would add something to my page whenever the idea arose. It was random or ad hoc. Now I know the optimal time to post to my page to reach the highest number of my followers and the type of subject matter that will help produce the most engagement with likes and comments. I now know the type of posts you want to see from me and will endeavour to continue to post items that you, my readers, want to read or see. Even if this does include me producing more embarrassing videos.
Not quite so surprising my first video didn’t fair quite as well as I had hoped even though it did include a kangaroo hopping through the middle of it. Possibly had I mentioned that in my introduction, more people may have had a look. I believe it was partly due to the timing of the post. Part of this particular challenge was for us all to post at the same time of day, This time didn’t seem to suit my followers and the video was lost in the confusion of the ether. Not that I’m complaining, it wasn’t very good, although for my first attempt I did my nervous best. You can see it for yourself if you like. I am posting it again here to demonstrate how far out of my comfort zone this took me.
Overall, it has been a huge learning curve and I promise to continue along my journey this year and strive to give my followers more of the type of content they want. Watch this space, the videos can only improve, (they can’t get any worse!).
Thanks so much to all of you who followed along throughout the month of January. I hope you too, have learnt a little something of interest along the way. Thanks for engaging with all the likes, comments and shares. The more you engage, the more I know what sort of information you are looking for from me.
Thank you to those of you who are new to my Facebook author page. I am so happy you have decided to join me. This month I have almost reached the 400 followers mark. Let’s see if we can reach that magic number by the end of February.
A big huge thanks to Michelle Worthington of ‘Share Your Story’ for organising this awesome challenge. I will strive to grow in confidence. Thanks for all your support and the support of all the other authors who came along on this learning journey with me.
Now it’s your turn. What have you learnt this month? Have you challenged yourself in any way?
Please leave a comment in the section below. Let’s share our learning journey together.
If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also like to read my January post.