Social media is nothing new. Most of us have been on Facebook for close to ten years now; even my eighty-two-year-old auntie is on it. But if you’ve been using social media solely for cultivating personal connections, making the shift to using it as a professional author platform is not always easy or intuitive.
When you use social media in a personal way, it feels like hanging out in your living room with your best friends and family members. Conversations are candid, intimate, and full of inside jokes and personal references. When you start using it to court the attention of fans and followers, you’re no longer in your living room; now you’re on stage.
It can be an intimidating shift for some. You wouldn’t invite a bunch of strangers into your home to look through your closets, but this is what it can feel like when you open up your social media to a broader audience.
This can make some people feel shy, and unsure about what is appropriate to share. When we’re unsure of ourselves, we fall back on formality. This can cause us to come across as stiff, awkward and inconsistent in our social media posts. Even worse, this awkwardness can make us dread even dipping our toe in the water at all. Social media becomes a chore.
Michael Margolis, CEO Get Storied, Founder Story U
Michael Margolis is CEO of Get Storied, the world’s leading school for business storytelling. I asked him to share some tips on how authors can use social media more confidently to build their careers.
“The trick to social media is learning to talk to strangers like they’re your BFF,” Michael said. “You’re going to need to provide some kind of persona, some aspect of your life that you’re willing to invite people into.”
However, Michael says, “This doesn’t mean that you need to go ‘open kimono’ and share all of your deepest darkest secrets with everybody in the world.”
How much and what type of information you want to share is totally up to you. Some people are comfortable mentioning their kids on social media, for example; others would rather not. Some share photos from their business trips or vacations; others prefer not to reveal their whereabouts. You get to decide where you want to draw that boundary, and it’s a good idea to make it a conscious choice.
Sharing a few personal details about yourself can give your audience something memorable to hold onto about you. It also offers them an icebreaker to approach you with. If you’re inseparable from your dog, you might post a daily pup shot. If you love to race triathlons in your spare time, why not let your audience in on it? Or you might simply host discussions on news from your industry. “Talk to people about whatever you like to geek out on,” Michael says.
It’s all about creating an authentic human connection. Personally, I am kind of a maniac about yoga and meditation, so yoga is something that I sometimes talk about on social media. Because I seriously love it, it never feels forced. Will my yoga posts resonate with every person who sees my content? Of course not. But for those who do relate to it, sharing from my authentic self helps to create a sincere and meaningful connection that wouldn’t exist if I only ever talked about editing or publishing.
Yoga also happens to be a good fit for my professional persona, because I run a publishing company that specializes in books that help, heal and inspire, but not everything has to dovetail into your career. There’s nothing wrong with being known as a financial advisor who’s crazy about sailing, or a business coach who is also an avid pastry chef.
“There are a thousand books that have already been written about your subject, in one form or another,” Michael says. “What people are actually investing in, what they’re going to remember from your book, is the emotional content. Part of that is about who you are, how you see the world, what path or journey you’ve been on.”
Having said that, you don’t want to fall into the trap of boring your audience with pictures of your lunch. So how can you be confident that you’re being appropriate and relevant?
“You want to make sure that you’re always making your audience the hero of your story,” Michael explains. “Yes, you’re sharing elements of your own journey, but it has to be in service to them. Ask yourself: why does my audience need to know this? How does this build trust and rapport?”
Fundamentally, your purpose in becoming an author is to share a set of ideas or bring understanding to a specific issue. To get your message out in the world and make a difference, you need to build a platform of influence; that’s why you’re on social media in the first place. Michael says: “One of the most important things that we all have to figure out with social media is that you have to find a purposeful, mindful reason to be using it in a professional context. And if you’re not telling your story, someone else is telling it for you.”
Michael Margolis is CEO of Get Storied and founder of StoryU. Michael also teaches “narrative intelligence” to companies like Bloomberg, SAP, and TATA. Michael is obsessed with how the Internet is evolving the way we approach innovation, marketing and the humanization of business. The son of an inventor and artist, Michael has always been curious about the deepest mysteries. As a lifelong seeker, story is his yoga. Michael is left-handed, color-blind, and eats more chocolate than the average human.
Get Storied offers a seven-part course in crafting a compelling and authentic personal brand called The New About Me. Find out more about it at TheNewAboutMe.com.
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