Creative Writing Wizard

You’ve written something amazing, or you’re in the process of it, and you want to share it with the world! But how? Allow me to walk you through things I’ve learned from other social media influencers, personal experimentation, and general observations based on these findings.

I would like to point out, that these are opinions and suggestions from my personal experience (and including few points I’ve learned from others) shared with the aim of helping people succeed on Threads. What is shared here has worked for me, but may vary for you. At the end of the day, you’ll need to find what works for you based on what your goals are and I wish you the best of luck either way!

These tips and tricks also apply to other creative arts, but will be through the lens of writers and authors (most specifically to Twitter and Threads). It is also a little longer than my normal length of post, so you may want to read it in chunks or grab a good cup of coffee.

I’ve also done a recent data dive into Threads, which is more detailed in specific examples (whereas this post is focused on the general strategies). You can find it here, though I would recommend reading through both!

1. Less of This
2. More of This
3. For all my Fellowers and Thriends (Threads Specific)
4. Fail Forwards

Less of This

Before we get to what we should do, let me share some that tend to perform poorly or get a kind of attention that you may not want. Why this first? Because when it comes to engagement and using social media algorithms, if you do some of these too often then you’ll potentially make it more difficult on yourself. Though don’t lose hope! As long as you don’t do something really bad and get suspended or banned, you can make your way back to having positive growth on socials.

1. External Links
2. Posting or Engaging with Negativity
3. Follow for Follow
4. Comparison is the ‘Joy-stealer’

External Links

It may not be apparent, but most social media platforms like to keep you on their platform and engaging with content there. Why does this matter? It’s important to know because external links or calls to action that lead off their app using key words (like “Link in profile”) tend to be deprioritized or (in some cases, like in Threads) can be hidden!

From what I’ve seen, people also tend to engage more with content that is on the app, which reinforces the algorithm to not share link-posts. The approach I’ve seen work more effectively is to share teasers, or ‘ads that don’t look like ads’. People tend to tune out when they see ads because we’re so bombarded by them that as soon as it feels like an ad (unless it’s something we’re really into already) people will tune it out. I’ll talk more about what works well in the ‘More of This’ section.

This is something I saw for my own posts when I would share linked posts but see lesser engagements. As soon as I shifted my strategy away from link based posts, I saw an increase in engagement! Since then, I have seen the occasional post that includes a link gain traction but in general they don’t show up in feeds or tend to have lower all engagement.

Posting or Engaging with Negativity

Something I’ve seen a few creatives fall into is being generally negative or salty towards a situation or others. It’s also something I have to be careful for myself too! I do get it, that sometimes it may feel good in the moment to vent either about something in general or about someone. From what I’ve seen though, complaining about our situation or things not going our way tend to not help social growth and have a tendency to bring attention we may not want.

Something that has worked for me in situations like this is to find someone to talk to IRL and talk it out with them. Picking up journaling can also be a good way to let that negativity out in a safe place without harming your social growth or engagements.

People can give the benefit of the doubt or overlook the occasional intense or salty post, but some people nowadays will mute or block at first sight. All to say, the occasional post may not be the end of your growth, but best to nip it in the bud.

I will say, there is a time and place for posts that talk about being sad or upset, sometimes having support from others can be helpful. Just be careful that you don’t slip into that being the default type of content you’re posting.

Be extra wary of “hot takes”. Even if posting in jest, by using the keyword, the algorithm will pull people in who tend to reply to hot takes (and based on what I’ve seen, it tends to end in conflict or fanning flames). So unless that’s the kind of attention you’re trying to pull, best to stay away from those posts. Don’t engage, either mute/hide or move on.

The above also pertains to engagements, the more you engage with that type of content, the more you see of it. This I’ve seen from my own interactions, as I interact with a certain kind of post (like “Hello Canadians!”), I would see more of it. This reinforced by others as they shared similar observations.

Follow for Follow

This one does depend a bit on what you’re trying to accomplish, but if you’re trying to get people to read your work or see your latest project, take a moment and think about who you’re trying to reach. People who are looking to boost their follower counts, at least in my experience, tend to not be the same people who will want to interact with your content or seek out your product.

Thinking about it another way, who is more likely to buy your book or read your blog? The person who sees you posting content that relates to your work and general vibe or the person who sees a chance to increase their own follower count?

I also caution creatives with the follow-all-back mentality (or follow for follow). While I do think it’s good to follow people back in most occasions and support fellow creatives, if you care about what you see in your feed, I don’t recommend that you follow everyone back. If you’re going to be building a platform or audience, you’ll want to surround yourself with people who you like to engage with or who share similar vibes/interests because you’ll spend a good deal of time on these platforms. And this goes both ways, if you follow someone and they don’t follow you back, try not to take it personally! You may have found content you like, but maybe what you’re sharing isn’t their preferred flavor and that’s okay.

Comparison is the ‘Joy–stealer’

One of my favorite quotes from Dune is, “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.” But for social media, I tweak it slightly. ‘I must not compare. Comparison is the joy-killer.’

This applies to most things, not just writing, but any time I compare where I am to where I see others it steals the joy I have for what I’ve accomplished.

For example, I have over a thousand ‘Fellowers’ (fellow creatives and followers, haha) across social media. That’s awesome! But if I look at someone who has, say, two thousand or even twenty thousand, it can be easy to say to myself that I’m not doing as well or I’m not as cool as them. This can also happen if you look at people who have less followers or aren’t as far along. It can be a slippery slope into misplaced arrogance and treating them as less.

So what works instead?

First off, I’d say an important distinction is to recognize that in most areas of life we are all running along-side each other on similar paths, each running our own personal race. Some people will seem to be ‘ahead’ of you, and some ‘behind’, but everyone’s path is so unique that it’s nearly impossible to compare accurately even if you wanted to!

If you find someone who seems to be further along or having accomplished something you haven’t yet, the best way to crush the joy-stealing comparison is to celebrate them! (It also doesn’t hurt to study how they accomplished what they did so that you can learn from their success.)

As for people who are beside or are still progressing through something you’ve already accomplished, the way to keep a level head about it is to see what you can do to help them. Maybe it’s sharing a post of theirs, or if they’re asking for help, see what you can do to help and support them!

Shifting our mindset in one of the above ways helps keep your own joy and encourages others at the same time. Win, win!

More of This

Still here? Good. Lets talk about what I have seen work well.

1. Engagement!
2. Be Authentic, Be Yourself, Be Your Brand
3. Advertise Without Advertising
4. Understand Your Target Audience
5. Support Others
6. 50/30/20 Rule

Engagement!

Similar to the golden rule, ‘do unto others what you’d like done unto you’, this also applies to social media but in a slightly different sense. Every time you interact with a post, you put your name, your vibe, and your content out there for others to see. If they like what they see, they’ll follow the link to your profile and see your other content. If they like your content again, that further encourages the algorithm to share your content with them! (And this is why branding in your content and consistency matters too)

Another thing to consider, and I’ve seen this, especially with Threads, is to engage with what you want to see more of. This also goes for what you tend to post: the algorithm will show you more of the same or similar thing to what you’re posting. So if you like or comment on artsy posts, for example, you’re more likely to see more posts like it in your feed going forward. If you see a salty or toxic post, ‘just keep swimming’ and move on.

The most important thing about what and how you post is the next tip…

Be Authentic, Be Yourself, Be Your Brand

What you post should reflect who you are and what you’re about. It’s much easier to keep an act up when it’s not an act (aka, being authentic)!

Take some time to think about who you are and what you want people to see you as. Think about who you’re trying to reach and what they’re looking for. Something I’ve found helpful is that I narrow it down to three major themes or areas that I check to see if the content I’m working on matches that theme.

For example, I’m a Fantasy writer who also blogs to help encourage and support fellow creatives (I’m also a bit of a goofy dadjoker haha). So when I’m about to post I ask, does this match the vibe or brand I’m trying to present to the world? Like most people, I have many sides. I also do art and music, but I don’t talk much about those things on my Writer accounts. Something that I’ve seen some others do is to create alternate accounts for different focuses (though, personally I only really have time for one major creative avenue).

Keeping your brand consistent helps people to know what to expect when they see a post from you. Posts that don’t follow your brand can confuse people and could lead to less engagement or unfollows.

Advertise Without Advertising

As mentioned above, people tend to tune out ads. So while you’re being your authentic-self, here’s a few examples I’ve seen work (and some recommended by Spangsberg Creations and Kerrie Legend)

• If you’re a writer, try posting a snippet of your content on the app and have a call to action to check out your profile for more info (which has a link to your site or linktree, wherever you’d like to guide them). Note that the call to action doesn’t say ‘link in bio’ but ‘profile for more info’, words like ‘link in bio’ can get deprioritized
• If you have a post on Pinterest or Instagram and you’re trying to share elsewhere, best bet is to put the actual image/video on the platform you’re posting to or include a teaser/trailer (vs sharing an Instagram link on a different platform like Threads or X/Twitter) This is something I’ve tried with Twitter and Instagram and I’ve seen more engagement on it when I post as a direct post vs a link or reference of a different app.
• Change up your wording if you’re doing similar comments across a large number of replies. Copy pasta (copy/pasting the same thing over and over) might be considered bot-like and hidden or deprioritized in feeds
• Talk about your work in a creative way. Instead of saying something that says along the lines of “here’s my book you should buy it” try something like “do you prefer high fantasy or low fantasy?” and then either as part of the post or commenting to your own post, briefly say which your WIP or released work is.
• What has worked from me is talking about how I tend to go about my writing, so for example my pre-writing routine of setting the mood with music, a brief pause or meditaiton as I let the story fill my mind, and then let the story flow from me. By sharing this, I show others how I tend to do things or what I find helpful while also getting interest in what I do.
• I’ve seen a few people do “ask me a question and I’ll answer in character as one of my main characters” or making up little character bio posts which is pretty interesting and creative. (Like Amanda Madison who you can find on Threads or Instagram). I’ve personally done a form of this recently and found it was super successful! I shared a situation and asked people to respond ‘in character’ to the situation and it was a lot of fun.

Understand Your Target Audience

This could probably be a blog post in its own (if you’d like that, let me know if the comments), but part of doing well on social media is understanding who you’re trying to reach.

Here’s some general tips I’ve found that help me craft what I’m saying and find the people I’m trying to reach:

• Start by listing out all the things that you bring to the table with your creative works. Once you have your full list from brainstorming, refine it further down until you have a handful of key things.
• Think on the question ‘who would like what I have to offer/say’ and try to get into the mind of that target audience.
  • What does your audience want to see?
  • What kinds of words to they tend to use (keywords, tags, etc)?
  • How do they tend to share on social media?
  • What do they tend to engage with and what does that engagement look like to them?

Support Others

While you might want to keep posting about your own amazing work, people will eventually tune this out even if you make the most amazing stuff. One way that helps to change it up, and also helps other people in the process, is supporting other creatives! While you shouldn’t expect it in return, often people are more likely to share your content if you’ve shared some of theirs. If people see you supporting others, they’ll be more likely to follow you because maybe you’ll share what they have to say (or maybe they just dig that you’re a supportive person!)

Some of the more effective ways I’ve seen this work is:

• Signal Boosting
  • This one is a new one for me, but especially with Threads and X/Twitter: if you comment on someone else’s post, it will boost that person’s visibility in the feed. How? Every time you comment on something, anyone who regularly engages with you will then have that post pulled into their feed. This is a great way to network! By signal boosting, it helps your followers see content that you engage with and get introduced to new people/content that they may not have normally seen!
• Reposting/ReTweet
  • It may not seem like it, but reposting and retweeting can actually help a lot. For one, it brings the post up to the feed for your followers, but also it shows that the post has been shared which makes people more interested in the post and may even inspire them to repost it as well.
• Visiting Social Media Homes
  • This one I learned from Kerrie Legend on Threads. When you see someone post something you like in your feed, follow it to their profile. Once on their profile (or “virtual homes”), engage with several posts there. I’ve seen this especially with Threads that the algorithm seems to like when you do this and I’ve personally seen an increase in engagement on my own posts when I do this. (this is also just a fun thing to do, and creatives like it). I would be careful not to bombard people with likes without actually engaging with the content as it might come across bot-like, but taking a few moments to actually engage with the content you may be surprised what you’ll find that didn’t make it to your feed.
  • You can read more details on her post “Threads and the Virtual, Digital Home” here: https://writeforimpact.substack.com/p/threads-and-the-virtual-digital-home

50/30/20 Rule

This is a new one for me, but I thought Spangsberg had great advice in her last newsletter. This rule helps you know roughly how much of what kind of content you should try to post to gain traction but also not lose people along the way. The rule goes like this:

• 50% of your posts should entertain or build community
• 30% should cheerlead
• 20% should be selling

If you want to dig into this more, you can check out Spangsberg on Instagram, Threads or her newsletter where she goes into details on each of these and gives tangible examples of what kinds of things to post that fall under those categories.

For all my Fellowers and Thriends (Threads Specific)

The above comments are good strategies in general across most social platforms, but I’d like to focus specifically on Threads with some specific tips and tricks, because I’ve personally found the most engagement there as a writer and want to be particular in what I’ve seen work.

And if you want to see a more up to date version specifically looking at Threads and the data behind what works well, check out this post: What Works on Threads?

• There’s a ‘Following’ feed on mobile! just tap the Threads logo at the top and then you’ll only see posts/shares of people you follow vs the For You page which is a bit of anything.

• On Desktop, look for a little button that looks like this

• If you see ‘comments hidden’ might just be private accounts or bots being filtered out, don’t stress!

• Reiterating, Threads does not like links to external sites.
  • One exception is in reply comments. I’ve had hit/miss success with these. I did have it happen where it hid my comment when I shared a specific link. Though maybe that site was flagged for something else. With this in mind, I have seen some success in having your main post be link free, then after posting you reply to your own thread with a link.
• Hold down the share button to go straight to quote-post! This one saves a few seconds, vs tapping the share button and then again on the Quote button
• This might apply to other social media platforms, but specifically for Threads, using certain explicit terms can get your posts hidden or deprioritized. The first time I noticed this, even though I was joking and making fun of myself, I got a pop-up asking if I really wanted to post (it was something about me joking that I was an idiot for something). I could have posted it, but it did give me a warning mentioning it may affect my post’s visibility. This was also recently pointed out to me that certain keywords about killing or death could affect your visibility and reach (thanks for pointing that out Tivuel!) While I have not tested this personally I have seen others report similar. In these cases, it seems that using asterisks bypasses the deprioritization (like d*e, de*th, k*ll, ect). It’s not something I’d rather test, so best to do like that or not use violent keywords if you can.
• You can set break reminders in the app! (Thanks p.j.danby_author for showing me how!) This is something I do recommend doing, and something I’m trying to do more myself, of being intentional with how we use social media. To get to the setting (steps from Android):
  • Open the settings click on Account
  • From Account, click on Break Reminder
  • And there you go!

Fail Forwards

But how do I keep track of all the things to do or not do? Well, part of the answer is you’ll make a few mistakes, have a few flops, and fail a bunch. What’s the trick then? The most important part about failure isn’t beating yourself up because you didn’t do as well as you hoped or feel you made a mistake. The most important thing about failure is to learn from what happened and try something new or different next time.

I will say, this process is not pain-less. But if we adopt the same mindset as iterative rocket testing, we’ll get there eventually by: trying something, failing (blow up some rockets, haha), figure out what to do differently next time, and keep pressing forward!

How about you? Let me know in the comments (or on any of my socials) if there’s things you’ve learned or find helpful for writers or creatives on social media.

If you like what you see, consider sharing it with fellow creatives as a lot of what I’m sharing here isn’t common knowledge and would likely help them as well!

• Glen W.