Whether you are a well-published or a newly-published author, you will want your followers on your social media accounts to be more engaged. Some people never get one like on Facebook or one retweet on Twitter while others will become incredibly frustrated; they spent months working hard on their social media accounts, building up a really good following, only to find that none of them seem to want to buy their latest book. Sometimes, it comes down to what you are posting; if it isn’t relevant to what you do then people don’t want to know. If they are going to sign up to a fan page, they want to read relevant posts. On the other hand, your post may be entirely relevant but it’s written in such a way that nobody wants to read it. Fans are important to you as an author and, if you do it right, you can pick up many more readers, and word about you will spread further. But first, you need to figure out how to get those likes and acknowledgments on your social media pages.

There are four separate levels to any fan community:

The ‘not really interested’

The ‘interested but a bit lazy’

The ‘fully engaged but never follow through’

The real die hards

The trick is to encourage people to climb up the ranks like a ladder, eventually reaching that top rung and staying there. The thing is, it’s never going to be easy to influence your fans so I’m going to give you a few ideas on how you can encourage the bottom three to move up to the top.

The ‘Not Really Interested’

This is likely to be your largest base of all the levels. It is basically for everybody in the world who is just too distracted and too busy with other things to pay any real attention to your work. They may have read it, they may have really enjoyed your book but they make no effort to follow any of your social media accounts and they pay little attention when any of your posts get shared by their friends.

This likely isn’t their fault; they may have very busy lives and, let’s face it, there is so much happening on any social media site that it's easy to get distracted. You are one tiny voice in a sea of millions and often they won't hear your voice, they won't stop to read anything you post and they won’t engage with you.

The way to get these fans to move up through the ranks is to persuade them to slow down, to smell the coffee and to read your posts. To do that, you need a social media page full of short, sharp and very snappy comments, you need loads of fantastic pictures and you need links to great content.

So, the lesson here is, grab their attention and divert it your way. Make them want to hear what you have to say and you are more likely to get them to move up that ladder.