USE DIGITAL LISTENING TO PROMOTE YOUR WORK

By Kasie Whitener

My friend Big Redd once discovered a conversation between a baseball player and his favorite Christian Rap artist in which the player thanked the artist for providing his walk-up music. Big Redd reached out to the player and promoted his own album. Three days later, it was his song being played on the Rockies’ PA system when that player stepped up to bat.

Big Redd’s strategy of “social listening” was to find the conversations that are relevant to your topic and then participate in them to promote your work. He called it “social” because he uses Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook social media platforms to do his listening.

I call the strategy “digital listening” because I expanded it to the blogs, podcasts, email newsletters, and events being promoted by other writers. You can practice this marketing strategy in three easy steps:

Find the influencers.

You probably already have your favorite writing blogs (like this one) and you may have liked several authors’ Facebook pages. Expand that list of follows to include the hashtags being used on Twitter and Instagram to link conversations. Then make a list of the eight or 10 places you’ll visit on your digital listening tour.

Create a habit.

Take to the internet once a week for research. Work through your list of bloggers, email newsletters, Twitter and Instagram hashtags, and Facebook groups and author pages to see what everyone is posting. Look for repeated phrases and common themes. Then Google those phrases to find even more content (or not) written about that subject.

Last week our Write On SC radio show had the topic “traveling to break writers’ block.” It didn’t start out that way. It started as “the traveling writer” because I figured every writer uses road trips for inspiration. When you Google “travel” and “writer” together you get endless blogs for Travel Writers which is a genre in and of itself. As these were not what I was after, I kept re-combining the words until I found some resources that talked about using travel to break a block.

The lack of search results told me that this topic was a place in the digital world with little to no content. I should write about it! That’s step three.

Join the Conversation.

Create content that contributes to the conversation. Using the keywords, hashtags, and influencer posts you’ve discovered, build something new. Then share that something new with all the people and conversations that you researched. Tweet your article using their hashtag. Comment on their blogs with a link to your own.

As writers, we often create out of an inspired frenzy making our efforts more self-serving than audience-serving. But when we need to market ourselves and our work, we have to find the audience. Let the digital world be your pond. Go fishing for readers by joining the relevant conversations already in progress.