Marketing off Social Media

Social media marketing isn't for everyone, and for small business owners, it comes with several tricky traps and challenges attached.

Junk AI content and tech bro CEOs aligned with hard-right governments stripping people of their rights are making it less appealing too.

And so this year loads more people are rethinking their social media marketing or ditching it completely.

In this ep, I cover the pros and cons of social media and why I've decided to take a step back from it. Enjoy!

Tarot: https://www.theuncrossedpath.com/readings

Off-the-grid toolkit with Amelia Hruby: https://offthegrid.fun/podcast

Attachment styles and social media: https://www.attachmentproject.com/psychology/social-media/

Transcript

Hello, and welcome, folks, to The Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist and fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called The Narrative Craft. Make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode, and sign up for my fortnightly newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates.

This episode is all about marketing off social media. It's become a really big topic this year as lots of these big corporations that own social media networks have aligned themselves with a hard right or even fascist government. 

But before I delve into that, let's start with the positives. Why might social media be good for an editor or author business? One of the big positives that I see is incidental contact. You can reply to total strangers, including famous authors, which is exciting, and it can be useful for getting the word out too. This is sometimes called top-of-the-funnel marketing, and I'll save a discussion of a whole critique of the funnel for some other time. But top-of-the-funnel marketing is a stage where people hear that you exist and that you have services they may need. And I met some great editors this way—really big editors. 

Say, for example, somebody might be writing a novel. They plan to self publish it, and then a friend comments on typos [in it]. They then see a need for editing, and they look out into the world and see where they can source that service. 

Another good positive about social media marketing, which is also a negative in some ways, is, it has a low barrier to entry. So you don't need a fancy website or skills. You can create an account in seconds, and you can start engaging in a way that suits you. So if you're starting a business, then social media can be a really good idea, and it massively helped me when I was starting out as a book coach and editor. 

Number three, if you get traction, so the famous viral post or whatever, where loads of people you don't know see the stuff that you're producing—the content on your social media—then especially if you have cheap products to sell like books or mugs or t shirts, the kind of things that people aren't going to generally dither over a decision in the same way that they might over a car or a new sofa or a big edit, then this can also be a great way of doing business. And another good thing about social media marketing is that you can also roll in activist messages as well, and you can get involved in activist initiatives online in really cool ways that link you up to people who are very geographically distant from you. 

Now for the negatives. Now, the big one, and people have been saying this for years, but it's become more important, I think, over the last year or two, is that you are on somebody else's turf, a big corporation like X or Facebook, etcetera.

That means if things go wrong in a flash, you can lose all of your followers and hard work. And I know lots of authors and editors who have spent years building an audience on Twitter, and they found it really difficult to then make the decision to leave Twitter and pick other platforms like BlueSky. And that's because they have this sense that they're losing, like, a lot of the hard work. And I have other friends who built a really big audience very quickly and don't have that feeling about losing their followers. So it really depends on the person.

Negative number two. Most of these social media spaces are governed by algorithms that are trying to nudge you to scroll there, to spend as much time as possible there. So you'll see initiatives like, some social media platforms have integrated games. Others will have very targeted marketing that will keep you interested in staying on their platform. Now the problem here, if you're a small business owner—who is both a business and a person—is that you're kind of swimming upstream because using these platforms in a way that is good for your business is not easy.

And that's because you're constantly being nudged to use those platforms in a way that is good for the platform and not necessarily for you. And your interests don't usually align because they are interested in you consuming marketing content from, like, paid advertisers and so on. Whereas your goal is usually to make other people aware of your business offerings and maybe even find clients through the platforms. 

Another negative is the presence of trolls. So if you get a lot of traction, you might get that viral post that I mentioned, you can expect negative comments and trolls. This can lead you to have a more defensive mindset, and it can also be damaging to your mental health. There have been instances of social media pile-ons. So a pile-on is where somebody posts something and then loads of other people weigh in. And usually, there's something a little bit controversial in the original post, but not always. And then everybody weighs in with their opinion.

And I've seen those get really nasty in the editing world. Number four, social media can be highly addictive for certain kinds of personality, and that especially applies to people who are at the anxious end of the attachment spectrum. So they can easily get addicted to social media. And finally, privacy.

These big companies know a lot about you and your business. Through your clicks, they are learning lots about your interests, your demographics, and so on. And if that big company is basically benign and this is just about marketing, then that might not be a big deal, but that's not always the case. What if, for example, the information a company learns about you, about aspects such as your mental health, things like your sexuality, ethnicity, lots of identifying characteristics, were then sold by a big company or, for instance, to a government. That would not be good for you potentially.

That could be really bad for you. So privacy is also a big concern. I've historically seen a big difference in this when you compare US practices with European practices. And there's been, I think, because of the history of Europe, the recent history of Europe, there's been a much bigger focus on privacy in Europe. And I think that is generally a good thing.

So they're the pluses and they're the minuses. And I will say that I think when starting out, social media can be really, really good for getting some basic visibility. 

I've decided to pull away from social media marketing. So I'll tell you a little bit about my journey to use that stereotype phrase and the decisions that I've made. So I set up my editorial business full time in late 2019.

My approach at the start was just to treat marketing as a series of experiments, and I had a really bad website and not a great social media presence when I was starting out. I was learning as I was going. I was trained as an academic. I did not know what copywriting was. And believe me, they are worlds apart in terms of writing style and just everything.

So when I started, I quickly noticed that content marketing was popular among book editors, and especially, but not just, long-form written content. That's blog posts, especially. So what I did was I copied the approach of editors I thought had really good content. People like Kristen Tate of Blue Garret Editing and Louise Harnby, who is basically an editorial rockstar. At this time, I also took some business-as-usual marketing classes, which basically suggested pick one social media channel and focus on it.

So you might pick LinkedIn if you're focused on long-form marketing. You might pick Instagram if you're focused on images or reels. You might pick, well, back then, Twitter, if you are focused on very pithy sentences as short-form marketing. And I also joined the social media team just to learn more about social media marketing. I thought this was essential because the training I received as an academic in writing was completely the opposite of what works on social media.

And the advice that I followed, which I've already mentioned, was just to have a presence in lots of places, lots of platforms, but pick one as your main focus. And write for that platform and repurpose that content for other platforms. So I made my blog posts the focus, and then I would adapt them into posts on social media. When I started out, mostly Facebook and Twitter, and then later on LinkedIn more as well. And this approach worked really nicely for me when starting out, and it also helped me manage a pivot away from the academic editing I was doing in years one and two exclusively to editing fantasy and LGBTQ+ fiction as well.

So, you know, I am pro content marketing. I am not pro social media marketing. And then what happened is that about two years ago, I noticed a few things when I took a look at my data. And if you're running a small business, I highly recommend that you keep some basic data on things like impressions for any post on social media, visits to your website, inquiries that you get, things like that. So I looked at the data, and I saw that social media specifically wasn't bringing me many clients at all, not directly and not compared with my blog.

I was getting clicks through Google, like a healthy number, but I wasn't getting lots of clicks through from social media to my website. Second, I noticed that I was spending a lot of time on social media platforms, especially during the pandemic. And I think loads of things went virtual then. So on one level, that's understandable. But these platforms were sometimes, and again, especially during the pandemic, making me feel anxious.

So I'd post and then I'd be clicking back to check on the number of likes, etcetera. And that is a form of anxious attachment, which I've worked really hard on, with a therapist in my personal human relationships to resolve. So to see this same issue coming up with social media, and then to later learn that I was actually being kind of hijacked in a way by social media to to have this kind of anxious addiction to it was something which blew my mind. Another thing I noticed was that some of the inquiries that I get through social media weren't generally the best for me and my business; they weren't the top-quality clients. They weren't the best fit for me.

And then Twitter was sold to Musk, and I immediately left the platform because it was no longer a good fit for my values. That, for me, was a no-brainer. Other people hesitated over the decision. Some people are still on there now, and I don't have any strong feelings about that either way. I don't know what it feels like to build an audience of, say, fifty thousand people, and I don't know what I would do in that situation if I had this really large audience.

But I had about fifteen hundred, which is not a tiny audience, but it's not a very big one either. So it felt like a fairly easy thing for me to do. And then with all the changes that have happened with the new Trump presidency and the announcements that the head of Meta made, I think that was in January 2025, I took my business off all Meta platforms, so Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. And that was a fairly simple decision for me to make, but it felt emotional as well because I'd spent a lot of time on some of those platforms. And I decided I'm going to pull away from social media in general.

So I'm still on LinkedIn and BlueSky, but I don't spend nearly as much time there, and I don't market very much there at all, just here and there. And I made this decision also after finding Amelia Hruby's amazing resources, getting off social media toolkit, and the interweb and a few other things. Check out her podcast as well because it's full of tips on how to get off social media. If you are feeling that social media is kind of sucking away your time or energy in a way that feels unhealthy for you. Now, if you're gonna come off social media, does that mean you don't have to do any marketing anymore?

That is not true. And that may be, like, an unhappy truth, especially for editors and for some authors. But if you are running a small business, you have to market. Marketing is basically making other people aware that you exist and you have these things that you are selling. So you have to find a way of of doing that just to survive.

And I know that a lot of editors and some authors feel very uncomfortable with marketing, and there are ways in which you can do much less marketing as well. So, for example, sending an email to a publisher, informing them that you'd like to work for them as a developmental editor. That's a form of marketing. Let's say you find five or six publishers, and they send you jobs every one or two months. Then you can stop marketing until some of those clients start to disappear. So you don't have to be constantly creating content.

And I've particularly noticed this with LinkedIn—it's that the algorithm rewards people who are constantly making content on the platform, and I didn't want to be doing that anymore. So I sat down and I thought about the alternatives to focus on. Now, as I've already mentioned, social media wasn't really bringing that many clients my way. Whereas my blog and my existing relationships with editors and authors all was. So I've just focused on that more.

There's something called relationship marketing. That is where you chat with people who have previously bought from you, or you just let your network of editors and author friends know that you have a spot available that you are looking to fill and so on. So relationship marketing is all about harnessing the existing relationships that you have or even building new relationships. And you can sometimes do that in very strategic ways. So if you have a great track record, here's one example.

You might approach a really famous literary agent who sometimes refers clients on to editors because they don't like to handle all of all of the editorial, kind of work like heavy line edits and developmental edits, etcetera. If that person then starts sending you work, that is a form of relationship marketing. Another form of relationship marketing is, if you approach a developmental editor who doesn't copy edit and you say to them, I'm a copy editor. Can you send some clients my way? So these are these are all different ways of doing relationship marketing.

Another approach really common among editors is, because you write, again, I think, is to build an email newsletter. So I've done that. And the great thing is if you're an editor, you don't need a lot of people on on your newsletter. If you're selling a really cheap product, that's like ten pounds, and you want to sell through your newsletter, then you need thousands and thousands of people. It's typically about one percent is a standard statistic or two percent of the people on your list might buy from you in a in a given moment.

If you're selling editorial services and that costs like £2,000 for a service, then you only needs a few, twenty say, maybe a little bit more, a a year. And you could do that through your email newsletter. Another approach is SEO and blogging. This one takes a long time. So I think it took me between three and four years from setting up a website and starting a blog to getting serious traction in the form of people saying they found me through Google on a regular basis.

I know that happens and that's great, but remember, this is a long-term strategy. I think three years is the recommended amount of time that it they say it takes to start seeing results from that. So that can work, but it requires a lot of energy and over a long period of time, and that's not for everyone. Podcasting is also a form of marketing, and it's great because you can find people who wouldn't find you through a blog or something like that. So some people like listening instead of reading, and that's cool.

And then there's doing in-real-life stuff as well. So one thing that I've decided to focus on is running workshops at both editor conferences, but also at universities and speculative fiction and queer fiction conferences. And that's really cool because when you're giving a presentation, that's a great opportunity for you to build trust with the audience there. They can learn about you. And then who knows, five years later, maybe one of them needs an edit.

They might remember you if you did a good talk or a good workshop. So that can also be good for building and expanding an audience, but you don't even necessarily need an audience if you're selling expensive one-to-one services, as editors do. And another has just another marketing approach. And this links to podcasting; it's called leveraging other people's audiences. People do this with email newsletters as well.

So I have a friend, and I'll put a link in the show notes, who has a small tarot business on the side, and I just dropped a link to it in my email newsletter, which is aimed largely at speculative fiction writers. And, you know, who knew there is an overlap between people interested in things like tarot and people who write fantasy fiction and so on. So what happened there in the kind of technical speak is by linking there, this other person, my friend Nebojsa, was able to leverage my audience here and find new clients that way. And you can do that too. So these are just a few of the different methods that you can use.

And I will say that all these methods were also at the business-as-usual marketing events that I've been to. This is interesting as well. So at these events, there were people talking about all the different kinds of social media marketing, but there were some people saying there are ways of marketing off social media. And more than that, [they said] there are people who are becoming addicted to these social media platforms for the dopamine hits and so on. So these were all discussions taking place at the business-as-usual marketing conferences that I've been to, but they were kind of on the side.

They were just other currents that were present. So I made a lot of these changes to my business over the winter, which I think is a it's a good time to meditate and think about your direction for the next year and make some quite fundamental changes before rolling with the new plans for the year, which is what I'm doing now. And I was scared. I was like, will people stop contacting me? I don't know.

Is is my editorial career over? Will I have to rely, say, more on publisher work in future? And a bit of me was also saying, well, you know, all that content marketing you're doing, how much of it was necessary? Surely some of it was necessary. Right?

Here are a few things I've noticed that my since I've moved off social media. My website sessions, that's where people people look at all of my different pages, at my services page, my about me page, and so on. The numbers are down. There are a few people who have clicked through and are playing around with that. But organic web traffic in general is down this year because of AI search.

So it's difficult to draw a conclusion there. Meanwhile, my blog views are steady, and that's after I pruned a lot of old, quite short blog posts on various sort of how-to topics that AI can now do reasonably well. So I just kept the long blog posts where people would dive in and read for a good ten or fifteen or twenty minutes even. So I did all of that, and I'm still receiving the same consistent stream of inquiries. And there's been some discussions in the marketing world about whether click-throughs and clicks are really that important as a yardstick, as a measure.

I have fewer people browsing my web, my website, etcetera, but I've received the same number of inquiries across that whole time. And now my podcast is taking off as well. So it feels like lots of cool things are happening, and my business so far hasn't really felt any negative impact from doing it. 

What about me? I think there's a tendency when you're in the marketing world to focus on the customer, the client, making sure everything's perfect for them.

There's this whole customer journey thing and so on. What about me? So how do I feel? Well, I feel a lot less anxious ever since I pulled myself off all of those platforms. I've noticed that I have better concentration and that I'm less distracted, I can focus more on the task.

And I also feel much better about being value-first, talking about what I believe in. That's a topic for a completely different episode. So overall, things feel good, and I will give you a kind of a marketing update and forecast every three months. I will let you know how things are going and what I plan to do next. I'm also keen to hear what you've been doing.

I've got friends who have been experimenting more with social media, for instance, with TikTok. I know one editor who's just started experimenting with TikTok and another who's been pretty successful in using TikTok as a marketing tool. So I'm curious to know what other people are doing and what is working for them, not just in a business sense, but in a human, personal sense as well. And that's it for today. So thank you, everybody, for listening.

Don't forget to take a look at the show notes for all the useful links. And if you want to keep in touch, sign up for my newsletter, subscribe, rate, and review. And I will see you next time.