Written with tongue firmly planted in cheek…
Managing your social media is a meaningless treadmill of work with no real purpose.
While it seems to be one of the most efficient and effective ways to promote books and authors, really, who needs it?
Sure, every publisher wants authors with strong social media numbers and self-published authors find it critical to their success, but other than these two examples, author platform is pointless.
There are ways to deal with all this, so I am going to show how you can rid yourself of the work and the frustration of having an author platform built on social media.
What I suggest is magic. It will make your social media and the accompanying work completely disappear.
By year-end (or sooner), you won’t need to trouble yourself with an author platform and be able to focus everything on writing books or whatever else you like.
NOTE: These social media suggestions also work for publishers, organizations or companies using social media.
In accelerating order, here are some sure-fire platform-killers, making social media unnecessary since you won’t have anyone following you anyway.
Step One – Starting Slow
- Uneven posting – Blog Tuesday this week, Thursday the following week and then whenever you think about it after that. Don’t be predictable or consistent. Variety is the spice of life.
- Stop creating new content – the world has enough voices and they don’t need yours. Use old stuff you did long ago and repeat it. New content is like new wine…not very tasty.
- 100% Re-posts – stop using your content entirely and simply use your social media as a conduit for other peoples’ stuff.
- Binge Re-posting – ignore your social media all week, then from 10:30-11:00am on Thursday, find fifty-three things to re-post. You will take over your friend’s social media home pages. You will get many, many un-friend/un-follows. Victory is yours.
- Social media holidays – the best part of these is you can make it sound noble and right. It is a good thing not to be engaged with your social media because it is evil and bad. And, you will have fewer followers when you get back, which reduces your work! Mission accomplished.
Step Two – Make Audience-Loss an Art Form
- Do not plan anything – Intentionally do things at the last minute, with no plan or idea of its effect.
- Branding Shmanding – Sure you are known for providing help and inspiration to dog owners, but the video of the cat caught on the ceiling fan is just too funny. Then there’s the clip from Britain’s Got Talent and the article on best recipe for calorie-free brownies. It’s all good.
- Politics – let your opinions shine through. Politics are great because no matter what stance you take, you are guaranteed to lose some readership. Those dog owners who buy your books will run away like they were chasing a Frisbee. Talk about magic.
- Want cheese with that whine? – Never a lack of stuff to complain about. It’s an endless, always-replenished reservoir of great material. This might just be the end of the line for your social media. You numbers might approach zero.
Step Three – Finishing the Job (For those few followers who remain)
- Re-post something with NSFW (not-safe-for-work) content – the best part is you don’t need to work hard to find inappropriate content to send along. It’s everywhere. And as an added bonus, you don’t need to review it beforehand and pollute your mind! Just send it on!
And finally, the Pièce De Résistance of social media killers…
Step Four – Obliterate with an Epic Rant
- “I’ve held my tongue long enough…” – As the last step to killing your social media platform (or the first step if you don’t want to do the above activities) starting off an epic rant on any subject you like (preferably something related to religion, politics or sports) will finish your platform for good.
So there you have it, the time-saving techniques of the 21st century author. I hope these were helpful.
The big decision now is what you will do with all the extra time!
