​Hello and thanks for being here! If you’re here, I assume you know me and either like me or are otherwise interested in seeing what I have to say, for good or ill, so I won’t waste time explaining that and will instead get right into the goods: sharing what I have learned in my relatively short time spent growing my social media accounts. This is information I have gathered by extensive reading of the best and most up-to-date resources I could find, personal experience, and experimentation. For this guide, I will be specifically focusing on Facebook and Instagram, as those are the platforms I know best, and I will only talk about free options to increase engagement and not paid ones.

Facebook and Instagram are both part of the now-Meta universe of offerings. They are connected and this makes it easy to upload things onto one and share it on the other. (Yay, easy! We love easy.)
There are a lot of similarities between the almighty algorithms of Facebook and Instagram, though there are some differences, too. I would like to say that the algorithm doesn’t matter, that quality content is king, but alas, that is not the truth. Catering to the algorithm is key to sustained growth. Quality content is important, of course, and you need to be willing to put yourself out there in ways that may feel uncomfortable, but you can do all that and still not reach your audience if you aren’t playing by the rules of the algorithms. Therefore, a lot of this guide will be spent telling you about what angers and what pleases the great gods of the algorithms and how you can use it and other actions to your advantage.

Frequency of Posting
For both platforms, frequency of posting is absolutely vital. Instagram is a little more forgiving in that you can take a day or two off and not suffer too badly in the engagement department. Facebook, on the other hand, is stricter with its posting expectations. For example, I took a week off of Instagram earlier this year and suffered very little in engagement because of it. I’m not saying there wasn’t a decrease or that it didn’t take time to build back up to previous levels, because there was and it did. A week off of Facebook, however, was devastating. When I began my week off, I was consistently reaching millions of people on Facebook every week. When I came back to it, I was reaching hundreds at a time, and it took roughly six months to get it back to where I was reaching millions a week again.
These platforms want you to be posting every single day, and if possible, multiple times a day. It also benefits you to do this, as long as your content is quality, because it gets more eyes onto your account and allows you to reach higher levels of engagement.

 
Post When Your Audience Is Online
If you have amazing content but only post at 3:00 a.m. every night when your audience’s peak engagement time is 12:30 p.m., you are wasting your time and talent. Though a fraction of your followers will eventually see it, with few people online to engage with it (and show Instagram that it’s worth engaging with), it will likely get buried and receive very little interaction.
Luckily, Instagram is very helpful in that it gives you data about when your followers are active each day. Simply click on the Insights button on your profile (right above your story highlights in your business profile), select “Total followers” in your Insights Overview, and scroll to the bottom of the page to see what times and days your followers are most likely to be online. Those high points of activity are the times when you should be posting. If you are unable to post during that time, you can schedule posts ahead of time using something like Hootsuite. I’ve never found a content scheduler that I liked enough to use, but I know many people worship and adore theirs, so you might want to try it or something like it out. (Many offer a free trial!)
 
Cultivating Content
You want a significant chunk of your content to be of your own making and celebrating your own work. You are, after all, trying to convince people that you as a person are interesting, brilliant, talented, or otherwise enough to follow and interact with you regularly, so you need to be able to showcase some of what is appealing about you.
For writers, though, to post as much as the algorithm wants you to would require spending far too much time on creating content and not leave you nearly enough to be working on your actual writing. I recommend having one post discussing your work directly or one sharing your work (even if that is in Tweet form, as I do) for every three to four posts that are not to help keep your pages feel less like a full-on ad for yourself and more like a genuine representation of your whole being. Your other posts might be things you find funny, pictures from your day, books you’re reading, quotes you love, or other similar content.
To ensure that I have enough offerings to sacrifice to the algorithmic beast, I have folders on my phone where I keep different kinds of content. When I first started in 2019, every month or so, I would visit groups on Facebook I enjoyed or Instagram pages I loved and save anything from there into my folders that I thought was appropriate for my feed. I have enough content now that I really don’t need to do that anymore, although I still do from time to time to keep things fresh. Having friends and followers who like to send you things that remind them of you also helps. (Thanks, guys!)
One note about the content you share: if it has a creator’s name or account name on it, try to tag that creator in your post. It’s only fair to give credit to the person who originally came up with it, and it helps to build connections between you and other creators. Also, if you found it on the original content creator’s page, it’s best practice to share it directly from that page when possible.
One of the benefits of social media sharing is that it’s cyclical. The same posts that are funny today will be forgotten and funny when they’re rediscovered six months from now, and Facebook will encourage you to share old posts through its Memories feature.
 
Knowing Your Audience
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get into branding here because I think it might belong in a whole other document, but it’s maybe incomplete to not include it here. You may already know this, but branding is developed over time, and it starts by determining what your core values are as a business. In writing, it’s the writers themselves that are the business, so you need to decide what aspects of yourself you want to focus on. I strongly objected to this at first - I am Whitman! I contain multitudes! I shan’t be diminished! – but ultimately, I realized that until my following was so vast and invested in me that anything I said or shared will be accepted, I would have to try to distill myself into distinct areas that would comprise my brand.
For me, that brand is joy, empathy, and intelligence. Those are the things I value most in life and they represent the way I try to operate in the world. To come up with those, I polled my friends and family, asking them to come up with the three words that described me best to them. When you do this, you can start to see the threads that comprise your being, and they can help shape the branding of your public profile.
Everything that I post or think about sharing, I try to weigh against those three words. After doing this for a time, I found that the more that I did, the clearer my core audience became. (I don’t know how much time you’ve spent looking at the data in your social media business accounts, but you can learn a lot from exploring it.) For me, my typical audience member is a woman in her late 20s/early 30s who is married but doesn’t have kids, loves books and writing, and likely lives in L.A., New York City, or London. Knowing who you’re speaking to helps inform the choices you make about what to post and how to present yourself.
For Instagram, your brand can be translated into your aesthetic. Many Instagram users want a visually-pleasing experience when they visit an account, and so cultivating an aesthetic that you feel comfortable working within all the time and that people will recognize as yours can be part of your branding. This might be a color theme, a pattern of posts, or other consistent choices. If you want to get an idea for different ways an aesthetic Instagram can look, Google “aesthetically pleasing Instagrams” and check out the many, many accounts that have worked hard to create their own aesthetic.
 
Interacting with Posts
For both Facebook and Instagram, you have to teach it with every post that what you’re posting is worth engaging with. Facebook especially does not want to let very many of your followers access your posts unless you’re paying for them to see them (which, of course, sometimes is worthwhile, but you can’t be promoting every post without spending a fortune).
To do this, as soon as you post, you need to be interacting with your own post.
On Instagram, this is most easily done by posting your hashtags in the comments. What I do is first post the emoji for tag and then as a response to that tag post the hashtags I’ve chosen for that post. (There is a separate section below on hashtags on Instagram.) I do this for two reasons: the tag is the only part that will show when people are scrolling comments unless they actively click through to responses, so it helps your comments appear neater, and it also gets you two immediate interactions with your post as opposed to if you only commented with the hashtags.
You should also “save” your post as soon as you post, which means clicking the little flag-like button at the bottom right of your picture. If you have a separate personal account, I recommend immediately sending your post to that account using the paper-airplane icon at the bottom left of your picture, saving it onto your personal account, and posting it to your personal Instagram story. All of these actions are reinforcing the idea that your Instagram post is worth engaging with and therefore Instagram will allow more people on your feed to see it.
On Facebook, I do this by immediately posting a relevant gif, picture, or link in the comments. Facebook has the added benefits of groups that you can share your posts to so that potential interested parties can interact with your post. It’s important to note that not all groups will allow you to post content from your own pages into the group. Some bookish and writer ones that will allow you to, though, are the following:

• Passion for Books
• Book Lovers
• Aspiring Writers United
• Authors Supporting Authors

There are naturally many more that might be better suited to your particular niche, and you may need to do some research to see what would work best for your content. In the rules of any group you wish to join, it will likely state whether or not posts from your own pages are allowed. If not, you can experiment by trying to share your posts into the group. If that kind of posting isn’t accepted, your post will be declined and you may receive a note from a moderator of the group in your notifications explaining that your post went against its regulations and therefore had to be declined.
In addition to sharing to groups, you may also share your posts to your personal and/or page stories. Any interaction you can give to your post, whether it is a comment or share, as soon as it is posted, is reinforcing the post’s value to Facebook’s algorithm.

Hashtags
Hashtags are not worth much on Facebook, but they are incredibly effective on Instagram. Instagram allows people to follow hashtags very easily and these posts are integrated into a person’s scrolling as seamlessly as if they were the posts of people they follow. When choosing hashtags for your post, it’s important to use ones that are relevant to the specific content you are posting. Otherwise, you won’t reach the audience you are intending.
To help ensure I use the right hashtags each time, I have a saved note in my notes app on my phone that has a variety of hashtags grouped together in labeled groups that I might use for any occasion. You can use up to thirty hashtags per post, but these are only useful if the hashtags you’re posting directly relate to your post. For example, if my post is about the writer’s life, my writer’s life group of hashtags will include (among others):
#writer #authorsofinstagram #amwriting #writersnetwork #writingmeme #writinglife #writerslife #writermeme #authormeme #writers_around #writing #writerslife #writersofinstagram #authorssupportingauthors #amwriting #writersofIG
I will also include #TaraWineQueen and #TaraWineQueenWrites in my hashtags of every post. This is showing Instagram that my name and account are something that people have an interest in following.
You can find popular hashtags to fit your posts online easily. A quick Google search will get you any number of possible hashtags, and from there, you simply need to choose the ones that work best for you and group them together in a note or what have you that you can easily copy and paste from when you post on Instagram.
Instagram will tell you that the best way to use hashtags is to choose a select few and post it in your caption, but Instagram is worried about the user experience of all users. As a content creator, you get more interaction from posting as many RELEVANT hashtags as you can in your comments than you would from a few select ones included in your caption.
 
Building Relationships with Other Creatives
The groups that you join on Facebook are a wonderful place to befriend similarly minded creatives who are on the same path that you are. The more genuine relationships you can grow in those groups, the more both of you will benefit. Not only will you make a friend and gain a supporter, you will also be getting more interactions on your page from that friendship and can likewise frequently interact with their content to further teach the algorithms that your posts are worth showing to more followers. One of my friends and I made a pact long ago to always comment on and like each other’s posts to help with this, so if you can buddy up with a fellow aspiring author or creative, that’s one way to ensure engagement.
Because many of the members are purely there to form connections with other similarly-minded bookish folks, they will often connect with you on other social media accounts, as well. For example, if you are a member of a Facebook group focused on reading and/or writing, sharing your Instagram account, TikTok account, Goodreads account, or whatever onto the page and asking people to follow and you will follow back is another way to make more connections.
 
On Instagram, there are many “engagement groups” (that are actually just accounts designed for this purpose) that are specifically developed for authors or other types of Instagram users to meet up with other similar users who are looking to have their content interacted with and will interact with your content in return. (Though I have joined these before when asked, I am the absolute worst at this because I always forget to tag my posts and forget that I’m supposed to interact with the others’ posts in a certain amount of time and so I do not actually use them.)
If you are interested in using them, though, you simply tag the engagement group account that you are a member of when you post your pictures, and the other members of the group will then like and save your content with the expectation that you will do the same for theirs when they post. Each engagement group has different rules, so look around to find one whose rules you are comfortable with before requesting to join one.
There are also what are referred to as “follow trains” on Instagram, and these can be helpful in connecting with other authors and bookish accounts. If you look up the hashtags “#bookishfollowtrain or #bookstagramfollowtrain then you’ll find thousands of posts just like these filled with other writers and readers looking to expand their Instagram network. These are a great way to make friends at first, but eventually, after you’ve hit your max of accounts that Instagram allows you to follow, you won’t be able to engage in these as effectively or as frequently.
Finally, please, please, please don’t follow to unfollow. While it’s totally understandable to unfollow an account if you dislike or disagree with their posts, purposefully following people to get them to follow you and then unfollowing is trash behavior. Don’t be trash. You’re better than that.
 
Skip Links for Facebook Posts
Sharing a link on Facebook will drive your engagement all the way down. Facebook does not under any circumstances want you to direct your followers off of their site, and if you post a link, it will only share it with the teensiest fraction of your followers. If you want to share a link, post a picture of whatever the link entails instead and then share the link in the comment. Even still, Facebook will not love this post, but it will be far less damaging to your engagement than if you posted the link directly.
If you can’t skip making a post with a link somewhere in it, make sure to couch it between two other posts that you can count on being highly engaging so that your engagement won’t suffer too badly overall.

Don’t Let It Overwhelm You
Easier said than done, I know, but this can be somewhat achieved by content planning ahead of time so that you aren’t scrambling to come up with content to post each day, and by limiting the time you allow yourself to spend scrolling on your accounts. I sometimes use what I call “the ten-minute rule” to help limit my time on social media which means that I can only check on my accounts the last ten minutes of the hour.

Most importantly, if you don’t enjoy spending time on social media, this may not be the best way you could be spending your time. I love interacting with people, and I enjoy social media (although I could do without comments sections sometimes), and so I don’t mind devoting part of my days to spending time on the platforms working. If being on here is like pulling teeth for you, though, but it’s important to you that you have an active presence, you may want to consider investing in a social media manager instead of spending your time and energy engaging in something you dislike.
 
I hope this guide of free ways to improve your engagement on Facebook and Instagram has been helpful to you! If you have any questions about it or questions that you feel would be beneficial if added into the guide, please feel free to send me a message or email me at twqwrites@gmail.com. Thanks and have a beautiful day!

Dr. Nancy Zane is a woman who is stern and fiery in turns but always brilliant. She met Minton when he was hired nearly two decades ago to work as an associate professor at GSU, and they would work together until her retirement in 2016. “Professionally, he was all one could hope for,” she gushes. “Witty, bright, creative, publishing, conferencing – and why?” Because, she emphasizes, he wanted to do the things, not get whatever accolades or recognition or advancement they might earn him.
 
There is a twinkle in Jon Minton’s eye. Despite his years on Earth and the tremendous strength it takes to remain gentle in a world that rewards brutality from its men, he has yet to lose his childish sense of wonder. “He is someone you always want to protect,” Zane confides, “even though he is perfectly capable and able to take care of himself.” This desire is echoed in others who know him, and it may be that the sense of wonder he maintains has been lost to so many of them that to see him walking around with it exposed to the elements triggers a desire to protect it, that the spark might never burn out; it makes you want to shield it from them, like hands against sunlight blinding your eyes or a sturdy wall against the raging wind.
​
Despite that desire, Zane commends Minton for his distinct brand of tenacity. Minton is “brave enough to show his gentle soul to the outside world,” she continues. “I admire that kind of courage.” 

Minton was born in the seventies in the foothills of Appalachia in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, best known for the music festival MerleFest. It was a quintessential late 70s and 80s middle-class upbringing, the imagery of a nerdy childhood something out of Stranger Things. He spent his time absorbing the works of Tolkien and comic books, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and marveling at the new Star Wars franchise. You can imagine his slight child-form there in the movie theater, quiet among crowds, mouth agape, delighting in the fantastic vision realized before him, allowing his mind to explore places previously unimagined, possibilities uncontained.
​
As an adult, he would grow up to love films, but not only the good ones that have high ratings on RottenTomatoes and the even better ones that can be found in the cozy basement of the local indie theater. He’d come to delight in the worst that film can offer, movies so bad they feel good, or at least scratch some horrible itch, and he’d use his love of classic horror to create a series of poems that would celebrate that love, those fears. The forthcoming book of poetry will be called Famous Monsters, and it will explore 1980s slasher films and how they relate to literary history, social dynamics, and myth. Friday the 13th is broken into a series of poems; “the first gods were made out of fear,” one tells us, and we believe it, knowing something deep within understands the truth of this better than we, miles and years outside the cave, ever could.

Poetry came to Minton in adolescence when he read Robert Frost’s “Bereft,” a brief but haunting piece that ends with the sobering lines,
“Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.”

It is perhaps when we are teenagers that we feel most exposed to loneliness, and so it is not surprising that these lines might have plucked at something inside of Minton, struck him as something worth holding on to. “There was a mysteriousness and an honesty in its approach to grief that fascinated me,” he tells me of how those lines hit him all those decades ago. “It still does.”

Still, he wouldn’t take poetry seriously until years later when he took his first creative writing course as an undergrad at North Carolina State. Under the tutelage of the poet Gerald Barrax, Minton realized that his feelings and ideas would be at home only in the words of the poetry he could produce. “I had to focus there,” he says, referring to the pages where he’d write his own poems, “and push the syllables around to find their music or meaning or whatever alchemy I could muster.”

Music, too, would be a big influence on both his person and his poetry. In his youth, he would fall in love with the punk scene, becoming a lifelong devotee to the likes of The Velvet Underground and Nico and The Ramones. “I can remember listening to PJ Harvey’s “Driving” in college and then attempting to use her syntax to create a similar sense of urgency in the poem I was working on. I’m not as deliberate in that way these days,” he adds, “but when I’m not writing, I stay in a poetic frame of mind by listening to music. You can’t listen to Nick Cave or Patti Smith for very long without finding something to write about.”

I put on “O Children,” let Nick Cave’s gravel and The Bad Seeds’ symphony wash over me, and I believe him. 

When Minton speaks of learning his craft, he credits the brilliance of his teachers. The rest of the above “You Told Me What Was Essential” is both a love letter to and a celebration of their direction and how it forged a way forward for him into the world of words.
​
“My first teacher, Gerald Barrax,
told me to carve a poem from something true,
then carry it, deliberately, as across a bog,
as if someone’s life depended on it.
Robert Creeley advised tactics over strategy,
a fox in pursuit or in chase,
not a commander drilling his soldiers,
as if it were enough to think
about where you are pointing,
without ever stepping to it, or beyond
what is torn, to find another ground.
Charles Tomlinson said the world is wavering,
there, as if someone had pulled a bow string,
and you could feel the tempered wood
trembling with it, a sequence of occurrences,
always to be believed, but never possessed.”
 
This love has been passed on to the students he has helped develop into writers and teachers and other professionals, and many of them who have graduated and moved on have nonetheless maintained a friendship with him, citing his kindness and compassion and sense of humor that’s “a little on the darker side.” Years after they’ve exited his classroom, his former students have reached out to him for everything from letters of recommendations to support while going through some of life’s most serious transitions. One boasted of having a key to Minton’s house, noting that Minton, a vegetarian, has eclectic taste, though his refrigerator is often bare. It is maybe this disinterest in food that has kept his figure so boyish, even as the grey weaves its way into his hair and sometimes beard. Another student credited him with saving his life, Minton’s kindness a bridge the student could tread on over a river of despair.
 
It is not only former professors who have influenced Minton, though. Among Minton’s influences are Yeats, who made him want to be a poet, “and still does,” and two more recent poets: Charles Tomlinson and Cole Swensen. Intelligence and generosity are key to Tomlinson, Minton says. “He’s always in the margins of what I’m writing.” Of contemporary poet Swensen, Minton offers nothing but praise, saying, “Whenever I read her latest book, I feel as if it’s the very thing that I’m trying to do, only several steps ahead of me. Her work has always been a kind of true north for me.” He recommends picking up her book Such Rich Hour, and reading it all at once, turning the book into a single poem you can dissolve yourself into.
 
I ask him if he has a favorite among his many poems, and he says his favorite is whatever one he’s working on. “I tend to get blinded by it.” He does, however, have one poem that he credits for changing his trajectory as a poet and opening up possibilities for him: “Landscape: On Charles Tomlinson,” a response to the work of the poet he so admired that plays with shape and form to create something meticulously crafted and includes a nod to bird skulls, the bird being a motif that will feature later on in his book of poems, Technical Notes on Bird Government.
 
Of that collection, author James Capozzi says, “Testing the language of myth, the naturalist, and the historian, Technical Notes for Bird Government taps into a vast, skeletal architecture underpinning the hugeness of the world, and its wounded places where we vanish.” 

Minton has lived many places in and explored much more of the hugeness of the world. The wounded places we might vanish into, that fearful loneliness Frost opined on, maybe aren’t all that’s left for Minton, though. When I ask about family, he lists his partner, Sabine, their assorted pets, and a large extended family with more cousins than he can name. When I ask where he feels most at home, he has several answers: Weston, WV, the small town he resides in; North Carolina, where he grew up; northern France where his partner hails from. They travel together when they can, he and Sabine, to China or France or wherever else might beckon to the pair.

“I can't imagine writing without it being informed by travel,” he says, reflecting on the spaces he has existed in. “For me, there is no poetry without a sense of place. I can remember moving to Montana and feeling very inspired and challenged by those massive mountains, those mountains that seemed impossible.” He knew they would change the way that he wrote, and they did, their stunning combination of sharpness and steadfastness helping shape him into something quietly remarkable.
 
When he isn’t traveling or running the English department or watching terrible movies or writing experimental poetry, he is editor of the literary journal Word For/Word, which he credits for changing his writing in ways that are immeasurable. Established in 2002, the journal has been a constant for Minton for nearly two decades. “I can’t imagine being a writer without it. In periods of writerly 'drought' in which I wasn’t writing much, it kept my mind focused on poetry in ways that probably wouldn’t have happened for me by just reading. And getting to work closely with so many utterly brilliant poems and writers and artists has been a gift. It’s become an essential, inseparable part of my writing.”

What beauty have we, the reader, gained from those hours spent toiling shaping the lines of others only to be paid to us in poems? What can we take from the treasures laid softly into our hands, sacrifices to our altar of judgment?

Whatever might be in our grasp as we diverge from the path we walk on the page with Minton, we must believe that it is more than our hands would’ve held otherwise. We have seen a gentle spirit face the darkest specters, loneliness and invisibility and responsibility unsought, and come out on the other side with his light still intact, a brilliance in the eye and a smile at the corners of the mouth.

“Dear reader, we were lonely, and became characters
in the dark, like flowers crawling up a wall.
We’re more than our sentence. We’re more
than this mouthful of air. If you’re telling me
there are rivers moving between us, I will believe you.
We fill the gaps with what we think should happen.”
- Jonathan Minton, from LETTERS