Attracting Readers: Social Media

I won’t go into the usual ways to promote your newsletter on social media, because there’s too many strategies to name: automations, DMs, who to follow, etc.

I’ll just tell you about two strategies that have worked for me more than any others I’ve done (and I haven’t done everything — some popular social strategies feel creepy to me).

The first is to announce your latest newsletter while tagging anyone mentioned or linked to in it. You can provide context as well if you like, but just tagging them is extremely helpful. Everyone likes to see their work being promoted by someone else, and it’s a great excuse for a retweet to their followers or a follow from that person directly.

When I do this well, I get several new subscribers. That’s not why I do it. I do it because it’s a nice thing to do. But the byproduct of doing nice things is that sometimes nice things happen back to you. This is so much better than the creepy social media strategies.

I also might highlight individual links or quotes used in my newsletter and post them throughout the week with a link back to the latest issue of the newsletter.

Sometimes this leads to someone discovering my newsletter for the first time. Sometimes it leads to discussions with additional links and ideas I can use in my next newsletter. It’s also just a nice thing to do.

Not every social media strategy needs to be creepy. Add value without expecting anything in return. That’s usually when people take notice.

Check out the rest of this month’s posts on creating email newsletters.