Social Media Part 2
I promised to return with an update on my social media efforts, so here goes.
I made a rather feeble attempt at a TikTok video last weekend, featuring me wearing a paper bag over my head (yes, I know that’s already sounding truly awful), and the best thing to do is just go over the figures. The video, with all the recommended book-related hashtags, got 806 views in the first hour (but only three likes, which was an early indication of how successful it might be) and by the next day it was dead-in-the-water, stuck on 843 views. Unless it’s reposted and/or goes viral, the life of a TikTok video is stunningly short.
TikTok is very good at analytics and in the case of this video they make interesting and disappointing reading: 66% of the viewers were 18-24 and 25% were 25-34. A staggering 92% were female, meaning that it’s really not reached my Lad Lit target audience. The video was 12 seconds long and the average watch time was 2.8 seconds with only 3% of the viewers watching the entire 12 seconds. Needless to say, thus far, it has generated no sales. In marketing terms, that’s an epic fail. What do I learn from this? I have to look at better ways to reach an 18-34 male audience. Maybe I need to re-launch the video with different hashtags. There may even be a #ladlit that I could try. We shall see.
It might seem naïve, disingenuous or both when I say that sales aren’t the most important thing but in a way they’re not. My main aim with the social media stuff is simply to attempt to ensure that anyone who might enjoy the books knows that they’re out there. A few more sales would be a happy by-product of that marketing effort but I’m not doing all this for income. You have to sell a truly vast number of books for it to be proper income, the kind of regular sum you’d need to live off.
No, this is just about that egocentric need to believe that even a handful of readers out there think the books are okay and worth reading. My sister, who has read them both, thinks that they are – and she’s a tough audience!
I’ll have another go at a TikTok video and I’ll be back next time with Part 3. With any luck, this will be the final look at the subject and we can move on to something more interesting.
Happy writing!