Own your expertise - not everyone knows what you know

My fourth favourite Instagram catchphrase

One of the most unexpected joys of teaching writers how to use Instagram to promote your work is that I’ve started to develop my own catchphrases.

Every writer and book is different, but the challenges and issues you face with Instagram are definitely finite, so often I find that you’re telling me versions of the same thing: you don’t know how to ‘go viral’ but this seems to be the main aim of the game; you feel uncomfortable with ‘selling’; being visible makes you feel self-conscious and you often worry about what Janet on the school run thinks about your online escapades; or you get frustrated because you can’t think of anything to post.

I hear versions of these challenges and obstacles often and over time have developed some catchy(ish) one-liners including:

Catchphrase 1: GOING VIRAL IS OVER-RATED

Catchphrase 2: FOCUS ON MAKING CONNECTIONS, NOT SALES

Catchphrase 3: NO ONE THINKS ABOUT YOU AS MUCH AS YOU DO

Like any catchphrase these are over-simplifications but like anything that gets repeated to death, they also contain truth and sometimesI have to eat humble pie and take my own advice.

Practicing what I preach

I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts folder for months:

I hadn’t posted it because it felt too obvious, too simple, the kind of information that people could just Google if they really wanted to know.

But when I finally did post it, it turned out to be a bit of a banger! From the 832 accounts it reached (my following is around 1.7k), 227 accounts engaged with the post, an engagement rate of 27%.

This can be broken down into 127 saves, 28 comments, and 158 likes but overall represented a higher engagement rate than most of my posts which have an engagement rate of 10-12% ( which is already higher than the Instagram average of 1-5% 💅🏼). I also keep receiving messages from people telling me they’ve applied the advice to their own posts.

It was a reminder to pay attention to my own advice and to OWN MY EXPERTISE (my fourth favourite catchphrase 😉).

I say this often, especially to non-fiction writers who are writing from a position of expertise, but it can also apply to fiction writers who have researched places, people, historical periods, architecture styles, city lay outs, or the rare metals required in the manufacture of broadband cabling and battery-technology (just me?)…

Your target audience for your Instagram content (aka the ideal reader for your book) should be interested in the things you are posting about, but crucially, they are not/ rarely experts, whatever the themes and ideas you are exploring in your writing, or that sit behind the story you are telling.

They probably could Google the information you are giving them, but maybe they don’t realise they want to know what you know, until you tell them. Perhaps they don’t want to spend time verifying the validity or truthfulness of the information they receive from Google. Or maybe they’re too busy to cobble together information from several different sources.

You are convenient, informed, and they’ve already decided they trust you. They want to hear it from you!

How should this influence your content?

There are three ways this should influence the content you post to your Instagram account:

1. Share your expertise, even if you think it’s obvious! The likelihood is that someone/ lots of people in your audience will not know what you know. Share posts that give tools/ tips/ analogies that illustrate a concept. You are the expert. Own it!

2. Keep it simple. One post = one idea (Catchphrase 5). If you want to add detail or nuance, do it over a series of posts. Think of your account offering a resource as a whole, rather than trying to make individual pieces of content do All of The Things. AND if people want nuance, they can buy your book/ sign up to your Substack, right? 😉

3. Don’t keep posts sitting in your drafts just because you think what they say is too simple. Whatever your book is about - whether it’s your life, your professional area of expertise or your characters - YOU ARE THE EXPERT, OWN IT!

Let me know in the comments if this is useful to you. I’m off to think on what other pieces of my own advice I need to follow.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash