Social Media for Authors with Jim Tobin: An Insider’s Playbook from a Social Media Pioneer

Ferol Vernon (00:04.098)

Hello everybody, welcome to the Written Word Media Podcast. This is the podcast for authors that want a successful writing career. And today I’ve got a very interesting guest. I’ve got Jim Tobin, a social media expert and good friend. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Tobin (00:20.261)

Thanks so much, thanks so much. Expert, maybe, maybe not, we’ll see.

Ferol Vernon (00:24.269)

Well, Jim is the CEO of a company called Ignite Social Media and an agency called Carousel that handles influencer marketing. He’s worked with some of the biggest brands in the world, Nike, IKEA, Samsung, Lowe’s, Crocs, you name it. And he is also an author. So for the authors listening, Jim is both our expert and an author. And he’s an author of two books called Social Media is a Cocktail Party and Earn It, Don’t Buy It.

Jim, I’m excited to talk to you today and I wanted to start the show off by asking you, what is your favorite campaign that you’ve ever worked on? What’s the most fun brand and most fun campaign that you’ve ever done?

Jim Tobin (01:09.073)

The Most Fun brand and the Most Fun campaign are so different. mean, Jeep is probably the most fun brand we ever worked on. mean, the passion for Jeep is through the roof. It made it kind of easy. But I think the Most Fun campaign was for almost the opposite brand, which is Nature Made Vitamins. I mean, nobody’s excited about vitamins. But we did a program years ago about mood, and they had a supplement that could improve mood. And we gave away a job to blog about your mood. And it was…

Ferol Vernon (01:26.806)

You

Jim Tobin (01:37.521)

was just such a huge home run. came at the right time in sort of the environment of the country. It came at the right time in the sort of pace of social media. And the uptick was fantastic for the brand. was really, that one, it was a long time ago, but I still go back to that one as just a home run.

Ferol Vernon (01:54.477)

That’s awesome. And so Jim, you’ve worked with all these major brands, seen some of the coolest social campaigns that are happening today, sort of huge budgets, really interesting programs. What is, I’m gonna talk a little bit about trend. What is a type of campaign that sort of wasn’t working last year, but is working this year? Like what are the new campaigns you’re seeing succeed?

Jim Tobin (02:17.804)

Yeah, there’s a couple things. mean, everything’s always changing.

What we see now is a little bit of social discovery is becoming more important. And I think social commerce is also becoming more important. Social commerce has been about to happen for about five or seven years. And all of a sudden TikTok shops is, I think one of the fifth biggest retailer in America or something. So Instagram is suddenly trying to catch up and you’ll see a lot more shopping on Instagram soon. So I think social commerce is a big thing, but also, you know, and this I think is really relevant to

Ferol Vernon (02:40.813)

Wow.

Jim Tobin (02:52.178)

book authors is how product discovery is done. It used to always be Google and now Google’s share of search, even when people are searching, is down to about 35%. So, so many people are searching on TikTok and Instagram and largely those two, but other platforms too, that content created specifically for discovery can yield longer term benefits than sort of traditional social content, which is, know, it’s half life is maybe a day, right?

You’ll get half the views within 24 hours that you’re ever gonna get on that piece of content. If you can get good social discovery content, content that’s surfaced when people search for a phrase, the half life of that content can be much longer.

Ferol Vernon (03:34.54)

That’s really interesting. so, and you know, I had book talk to talk about later in the show, but maybe let’s just talk about it now. You mentioned that the commerce on TikTok is going crazy and you know, lot of the authors that are listening have obviously heard about Book Talk or are consuming that content. Talk to me a little bit about like the mechanics. What are you seeing in terms of like how people are discovering and then actually transacting and actually buying products?

Jim Tobin (03:38.768)

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (04:01.216)

So TikTok’s interesting. TikTok shops has grown a lot of people have got a lot of faith in TikTok shops. It’s a very easy purchase path. You click a couple of buttons, you click Apple Pay or whatever on Google and boom, you get the product delivered fairly quickly. They almost got rid of the ability to fulfill your own orders.

About two months ago, they said they were going to end that, that anything sold on TikTok shops, you had to ship it to TikTok warehouses so they could ship it out. As you might expect, there was a big backlash against that and they backed away and said, no, no, you can still fulfill it yourself and you can fulfill through Amazon or you can fulfill out of your living room. You just got to get it shipped out within, I think, two days to keep yourself in good standing. So, authors can still do some fulfillment themselves.

through TikTok shops, think that would be worth experimenting.

Ferol Vernon (04:56.939)

That’s awesome. So like on TikTok and sort of the vertical video revolution, what kinds of content are you seeing working? Obviously people, huge brands pay you to develop these campaigns. What kinds of things when somebody comes to you, what are some of the arrows in your quiver, so to speak, for those kinds of campaigns?

Jim Tobin (05:02.746)

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (05:17.506)

Yeah, it really comes down to the way you do your content. And really that first three seconds are hugely important, not just to grab the listener, but to grab the algorithm. And in fact, even your book cover, if you show it, is going to be really important. Because today, these algorithms are really designed to be prediction engines. So they’re serving content based on the cues. So they’re actually

looking at the video, the AI is actually looking at your book cover and trying to decide what it’s about. And they’re listening to your words or reading the transcript of your words. They don’t actually listen. But all of those things are signals to the AI as to what your book is about. And it’s really important that you make it clear to the AI and make it clear in the content. That’s one part. The other part

is that the algorithm is really rewarding consistency. And consistency in two ways. One is consistent posting. If you’re only posting when your book is ready to launch, you haven’t built up any sort of credibility. You haven’t told the algorithm what your content’s about over a period of time. You haven’t really juiced the algorithm. So that’s a part of it is steadily doing that content.

And then the other part is making sure that that content grabs right away.

Ferol Vernon (06:43.07)

Yeah, I’m gonna go back to something that you said that just like blew my mind. You said it’s the first three seconds of the video is that’s where we need to get the hook in. So when you’re trying to communicate an idea like for one of your brands and maybe it’s a complicated idea, it’s the value of a product or something, how do you get that out in three seconds?

Jim Tobin (06:49.668)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Tobin (07:03.728)

Well, you don’t have to get the answer out. You at least have to get the question out. like, you know, for a fiction author, maybe it’s if you like X, you’ll love Y. So you talk about a famous book that’s sort of got the same DNA as yours, and then that can be done in three seconds. And now you’re talking about, you know, you need to meet the Jones family that has this, you know, da, da, da, da, da. So you have a little time once you grab the hook. So I think…

Ferol Vernon (07:07.955)

Hmm, interesting.

Jim Tobin (07:31.769)

I think that’s part of it. And then you can also have maybe, particularly if you’re a nonfiction writer, what’s the common wisdom everyone thinks is right but is actually wrong? You can get that hook out in three seconds and negative hooks outperform positive hooks. And so now you’re positioning yourself as an authority, right? But you’re getting that hook in there or that thing that people don’t know about this topic. Boom, that’s in three seconds. And then you have a little time to air things out.

Ferol Vernon (08:01.326)

That’s really interesting. so just for those of us that maybe aren’t steeped in the world of marketing, talk about, you said a positive hook and a negative hook. Explain those two things to us a little.

Jim Tobin (08:11.918)

Yeah, so the negative hook would be why email marketing is actually killing your progress. It’s not, but that would be a negative hook versus email marketing can make you millions. That’s a positive hook. And people are much more likely to pause on the negative hook because we’re human and that’s just the way it is.

Ferol Vernon (08:21.203)

Right. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (08:30.128)

I see, okay, got it.

Ferol Vernon (08:37.468)

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (08:38.766)

You know, knowing that, and I like to think one of the things we say about Ignite as a company is that we operate at the intersection of psychology and technology. And so does anyone trying to use social media, right? You’ve got to think about the psychology of what gets you to stop the scroll. What’s thumb stopping content to you? And then, and then you can produce it. It’s, it’s, there’s a bit of a formula to it.

Ferol Vernon (08:55.464)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (09:02.898)

So for our authors that are out there on sort of a shoestring budget, and they’re trying to come up with that formula, what is the magic formula for producing this content that the algorithms and people want to see?

Jim Tobin (09:14.638)

Yeah, I think the magic formula is consistency and a little bit of behind the scenes. So, you know, I think people want to see what you go through to write. don’t think a few years ago, five, four or five years ago, Instagram in particular was perfection marketing, right? The perfect house, the perfect meal. Everything was beautiful. That we’ve moved on from that. People want to see the real real now. And so, you know, the messiness of

Ferol Vernon (09:34.524)

Yeah, everything looked beautiful.

Jim Tobin (09:44.677)

you know, old cups of coffee and 42 browser windows and, you know, crumpled up paper or deleted scenes folder or whatever, you know, that is, that sort of lo-fi content is working really well. The other thing is engaging. So another trend you might see a lot is the comment reply video. Somebody asks you a question, you take that, put the question up here and reply to it. I mean,

Ferol Vernon (10:10.216)

Mm.

Jim Tobin (10:13.134)

Why did this character do that? Now you’re beginning to build a community around your characters, around the topic that you cover, about who you are as a writer, the struggles you’ve had. I think, I mean, I’ve written two books and neither one was a big bestseller. I’ve had this company for 19 years now. I still have imposter syndrome. If you don’t,

kudos to you, you’ve broken through. But most everyone else has, and I think if you can show that, you know, that part of things, people relate to you better than, you know, I’m a genius author and I’m perfect. It’s a little hard to relate to, because who is?

Ferol Vernon (10:57.394)

Yeah, that’s great. I think that’s also probably very comforting to hear to a lot of our authors who are maybe, know, sometimes I’m generalizing here on the more introverted side, a little bit less likely to put themselves out there on video. So it’s great to hear that sort of a more authentic approach can work.

Jim Tobin (11:13.198)

Absolutely.

Ferol Vernon (11:14.856)

So we’ve been talking a lot about social and video. You when you started Ignite, a lot of social content was text or images. And it feels like we’ve gone full video. Is that true? Have we gone like full video that all social content is video or is there still a space for text and images?

Jim Tobin (11:23.236)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Tobin (11:33.329)

There’s a space for both, text less so, but images more so. So yeah, when we started in 2007, you couldn’t even upload a photo to the newsfeed. So yeah, first we had to photographers, then we had to get videographers. So video, a couple years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said 100 % of content on Facebook would be video. I knew right away that would be wrong. He’s been right a lot, and I’ve been wrong a lot, but that one I knew was wrong because sometimes you…

you’re not in a place where you want to watch a video. Just in the last two or three months, there’s been a lot of data that carousels, which are multiple images, you can actually put a video in these blocks of, you know, five, 10, even I think 20 images on Instagram, carousels are now slightly outperforming reels. And so, yeah, so you can do something like, you know, AI, you need to be careful with how you use AI. But let’s say you’re a fiction writer,

Ferol Vernon (12:21.262)

Really?

Jim Tobin (12:31.8)

You could do two AI images of one of your characters and ask people to vote on which one looks more like the character in your head. Yeah. And you could have that, you can have five of those in a carousel with five different characters. Or, you know, which, even which scene, you know, reads better to you or which, which backstory is more credible to you. And those could be done in carousels and carousels are doing really well again.

Ferol Vernon (12:39.727)

In your mind, yeah.

Jim Tobin (13:01.648)

Not only on Meta and TikTok, which we’ve talked a lot about, but on Instagram carousels are doing really well. Did I say LinkedIn? Because I meant to say LinkedIn. meant to say that carousels are doing really well.

Ferol Vernon (13:08.006)

That’s great. And so you’re saying, when you say…

And when you say carousel, it’s really just a slideshow, right? It’s just a series of images that are attached to the post.

Jim Tobin (13:20.526)

Yeah, I when you go to create a new post and you get your photos and you can click five or 10 of them, that’s a carousel. It’s not complicated.

Ferol Vernon (13:29.639)

Okay, cool. And this world of social, you started this agency a long time ago and then at some point after kind of the social revolution got started, you started Carousel, which is influencer marketing. so talk to me about that. Obviously the rise of the influencer, that’s like a job now that 10 years ago that wasn’t a job. How do big brands think about working with influencers? And then we’ll talk a little bit about how authors might think about it as well.

Jim Tobin (13:44.9)

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (13:59.087)

Yeah, they think about it a couple ways. One is content creation. So we create content for brands and it’s hard. Like you have to create a compelling piece of content. If you do it every business day, you’re doing it, 22, 23 times a month, every month, over and over again. And maybe you make peeps candy or whatever you make, right? You’ve got to do content on that over and over and over over again. And so it’s challenging. And so one…

way influencers are valuable brands is you can hire five of them or 200 of them and have them create content about your product. And now you’ve got, assuming your contract is good with them, you’ve got the rights to use that content. It’s very helpful. Secondly, if I tell you, you know, that written word is fantastic, that’s going to resonate more than Ferol, you telling people that written word is fantastic, right? When a third party vouches for something,

The third party credibility that comes along with influencers has its own value as well. so, you know, different voices. a third thing is I think brands are good at talking about their product and influencers are good at talking about how the product improves their life in some way. Better, food, better fitness, better look, whatever it might be. Influencers just naturally gravitate to product benefits, which is really the way to market.

Ferol Vernon (15:21.158)

Yeah, that’s so interesting because when we talk to authors, we’re always talking about that. Like, hey, you can talk about the book, that’s the feature, but how do I feel when I read the book? What’s the set the scene for me? Like, is this reading on the beach? Am I reading in bed? Am I excited? Am I calm? And so you’re saying influencers can actually provide third party authority for those benefits, those feelings.

Jim Tobin (15:45.839)

Yeah, and if somebody’s doing book talk on a regular basis, they may be doing it completely on their own, they may be picking their own books, or maybe people are mailing in the books, or maybe people are paying them to include their books. If they’re paid, they’re supposed to include a disclosure on that. We do all the time, but small budgets sometimes slide that through. But you might be able to send your books free to someone who’s a regular in your genre talking about books in there.

Ferol Vernon (15:56.932)

Right.

Ferol Vernon (16:06.191)

Sure.

Jim Tobin (16:14.978)

in their TikTok or in their Instagram.

Ferol Vernon (16:17.199)

Yeah, so let’s spend a minute there because that’s a really interesting point. how would I approach, obviously you’re a huge agency. You’ve got people that work with influencers and probably have those relationships built, but let’s say I don’t have those relationships built. How do you approach a book talker, for example, or an influencer? Like what’s an ask that, know, do I want it to feel transactional? Do I want it to feel more relationship driven? Like how do you approach that?

Jim Tobin (16:41.904)

Yeah, there’s a couple ways and it depends a little bit on your budget. Let’s assume your budget is zero or close to zero. You need to build a relationship, right? Comment on their stuff, not just in genuinely, but if you really enjoy their stuff, reply, say something, you know, post it to your story, whatever. And then, you know, finding, it is so easy to find anyone’s address. I can find Ferol if we want to.

Ferol Vernon (16:49.736)

Hahaha!

Ferol Vernon (16:59.16)

Tell them, yeah.

Jim Tobin (17:10.96)

find your address in two seconds right here. It’s really easy to find someone’s home address. If you know their name and the city they live in, it’s crazy easy. You could send them a note, I would send them a book and I would include a note saying, not asking for anything, but just saying, I love your talks or your TikToks and I thought you’d really potentially be interested in my book. Love your feedback, you can DM me at whatever and just send it to them.

Ferol Vernon (17:12.046)

Ha ha ha ha.

Jim Tobin (17:40.965)

You know, you can wait a week and say, hope you got my book. If you have any, you know, any feed, I’d love any feedback, you know, I’m early in my career, whatever, whatever. So just be a human being. There’s so many people trying to automate scale that actual genuine human being handwritten notes breakthrough.

Ferol Vernon (17:53.454)

This

Ferol Vernon (17:58.999)

Interesting. That’s amazing. And like, let’s you mentioned budget near zero, 

A lot of our authors have budget, but it’s small, right? So maybe they have a few hundred dollars. What kind of ROI can I expect? How do I bring up with an influencer, somebody on TikTok or whatever, hey, I’m willing to pay you a few hundred bucks to talk about my book. Is that something you don’t bring up right away or should you be upfront about that?

Jim Tobin (18:29.828)

You should probably be upfront about that because what people with little to no budget say when they approach an influencer is, would you be interested in a partnership or a collaboration? Which the influencer reads immediately is they got no money. And they’re getting hundreds of these and they’re, know, collaboration doesn’t butter the biscuit, right? It doesn’t carry the wheels, right? And so, you know, they’re likely going to delete those if they get them on regular basis.

Ferol Vernon (18:40.291)

Right.

Ferol Vernon (18:51.435)

Eheheheheh!

Jim Tobin (18:59.472)

saying something like, you know, hey, would love for you to include this. have a budget of, you know, $250. I don’t know if that’s sufficient for what you’re doing, but I’d be happy to pay you for your time, whatever. I mean, at least they can say, you know, I charge $5,000 or I would love to do that or something. But getting that out early because otherwise there won’t be, they’re just going to delete your email. won’t be a second chance.

Ferol Vernon (19:16.163)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Jim Tobin (19:26.318)

Having said that, if I had a small budget before I went to influencers, I would do what we call organ-ish boosting of my own content. in our world, we call organic content, content you just shared, Instagram or wherever, you don’t put any media dollars behind it. And then there’s paid content. So for us, there’s paid and there’s organic. We have a third category in the middle we call organ-ish. So it’s that social first content that

Ferol Vernon (19:41.475)

You create it yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Tobin (19:55.985)

looks real and genuine because it is, but you put a few dollars behind it. And you can put $5, $25 around a piece of content. There’s a boost button on Meta, similar. Yeah, and just boost that. if you want to see why, there’s an Organish calculator on our website. If you search Organish calculator, who else is trying to rank for the word Organish, right? You’ll find us.

Ferol Vernon (20:07.779)

They make it real easy, don’t they?

Ferol Vernon (20:22.23)

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (20:23.352)

And you can put in there how much it’s costing you to create a piece of content, whether that’s, and it costs you time. So you can say, well, probably a hundred dollars in my time or whatever. And then what if I put in $25 or what if I put in a hundred dollars? What would I get? And you can predict the number of views and impressions and engagements you’re going to get by adding a few dollars to it. And if you’re spending this time creating content, the incremental spend can make it reach 5, 10, 20 times more people.

It’s a really good investment to start with.

Ferol Vernon (20:56.386)

That’s amazing. Okay, that’s a good tip for all of our listeners. If you spend the time to make the content, throw a few bucks behind it, sort of promote it, get the word out, leverage the time that you’ve spent to create the content.

Jim Tobin (21:06.96)

And then the leverage of data comes back, right? If you did 25 bucks to 5 pieces of content and 2 of them got this and 3 of them got this, well, this is telling you you did something right. So do more of that and do less of this.

Ferol Vernon (21:23.97)

So yeah, you bring up an interesting point around the content and what you do with it. So let’s say I create five pieces of content. I’ve managed to get over myself and my imposter syndrome and I record a few things. When I create this, how do you think about cross-platforming? Like, can I record one video and then it goes to TikTok, post the same thing to Instagram, the same thing to YouTube, or do you really need to be sensitive to the different platforms and what works there?

Jim Tobin (21:49.147)

So what’s the expression? Perfect is the enemy of good? I mean, in the ideal world, you would do separate, slightly different content, right? But we have a lot of clients who have fairly big budgets that can’t afford to do a completely fresh piece of content across all the platforms. And sometimes you don’t need to. So sometimes brands will share some of the content from Instagram to TikTok and some of the TikTok content to Instagram.

Ferol Vernon (21:52.662)

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (22:16.76)

And rewrite the caption a little bit to make it make sense. Like don’t use BookTok on Instagram, things like that. But I think the better thing to do is at least get it out there and see is it resonating better on one of the platforms or another because YouTube has YouTube Shorts. So it’s the same vertical video, TikTok, Instagram, even Snapchat you can upload videos to. They’re all 9:16. You can put them in all the places and you can get feedback on the what’s.

what’s working better. You may attract a bigger audience in YouTube shorts than you expected, for example. So start with that. And I think just forcing yourself to do it, whatever, every day or twice a week or whatever you can stand, you’re going to learn as you create this content. And initially, if you don’t have a lot of followers and you’re not getting a lot of engagement, nobody’s seeing your mistakes. It’s okay. They’re just ignoring it. It’s okay. Just learn and you’ll get more comfortable.

Ferol Vernon (23:00.32)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (23:09.022)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (23:16.194)

That’s amazing. Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit, you know, with, with authors, they have one type of product. It’s a book, right? Sometimes it’s an audio book. Sometimes it’s a print book, whatever. and they’re not doing rapid release most of the time, or if they are, you know, maximum, maybe they have 10 products a year that they’re launching. So a lot of that time is spent sort of in pre-launch mode, right? When you’re like, you have a new title coming up when you’re advising a big brand.

How do you think about spending budget before a product comes out and then after a product comes out? Like, do you think about that dynamic?

Jim Tobin (23:50.713)

Yeah, so there’s brand and product and you the author of the brand and each book you have as a product. A couple things. One is I don’t, I’m not a big fan of mystery posts. Like a lot of clients like to go big with something they’re going to announce a month later. And I was like, I’m like, no, you’re wasting energy. If you can get somebody’s attention and get them to click, that’s hard. And now you’re wasting it.

when they can’t convert. So yeah, so I would do a lot of book process stuff. Maybe you’re not sharing the title, but you’re giving a rough idea of what it’s about or the hero’s journey continues or the struggles you’re having as an author, all of that happening. And that’s really you, the brand, you’re the author, you’re sharing the creative process, you’re sharing a little behind the scenes.

Ferol Vernon (24:21.748)

Get the thing, yeah.

Jim Tobin (24:49.784)

And then when it’s time, you know, I think it’s okay to the content shifting to, you know, if you support me, it’d be great if you’d buy it this week because then I’d jump up the Amazon charts. just overtly asking, like, you know, if you have any interest, it’d be great to buy it today. And then sharing the next day, hey, I’m fourth in the Amazon category for this, this, and this. You know, those sorts of things I think are fine to do. And then continuing after the books come out to.

Ferol Vernon (25:10.518)

Right.

Jim Tobin (25:17.072)

to going back to you as a brand, going back to parts of the book. The nice thing about social media, it’s the inverse of like TV advertising where you have to take one feature and just beat it over the head repeatedly. With social media, you can break into a thousand pieces and see which of those hundred or 200 of those thousand pieces people are interested in and keep drilling into those.

Ferol Vernon (25:41.92)

That’s amazing. So Jim, one of the things, and we’ve known each other a long time, and I know one of the things that you sort of preach and talk about a lot is humor, right? And the importance of humor and advertising. So, and you know, we have a lot of authors who have humor in their books, but we also have a lot of authors that are dealing with sort of dark topics, right? Or dark fantasy, dark romance. These are really popular genres right now. How do you think about picking your humor level per brand? when you’re working with Sumber and like, should authors think about that?

Jim Tobin (26:15.802)

You know, humor has its place. I already talked about negative hooks versus positive hooks. So negative hooks that are not funny also have their place. You know, there’s a lot of different ways to go on social media. I think humor is very hard to do, number one. So I would be comfortable trying it as long as you’re willing to kill it before you post it. If you just know it’s not resonating or you have

a spouse or a partner or a child who will be like, your child is cringe, you know, all along. And sometimes cringe is okay. If you’re old enough, cringe is okay. But if you’re young and it’s cringe, no, maybe not. So I think it’s okay to try it. you know, I’m Irish. If you’ve ever been to a wake for an Irish person, know dark humor can resonate really, really well. But you’re also recording yourself and you’re putting it out on social media where everybody might not get it. So.

Ferol Vernon (26:49.161)

Ha ha ha ha!

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (27:13.24)

And, I’d be a little cautious about that. We have an intentionally diverse staff in terms of age and experiences and genders and ethnicities, not just because of altruism, but because we know when we post something, everyone’s going to hear it a different way. And we need to be careful that we don’t hurt any of these brands that have entrusted us. know, being able to risk is okay, but you might, you to check your risks and make sure they’re intelligent risks and not just.

Ferol Vernon (27:29.215)

Mmm.

Jim Tobin (27:43.608)

I gotta get you canceled, you know?

Ferol Vernon (27:45.535)

Yeah. So how do you, how do you, uh, you know, for lack of a better word, like workshop a joke or workshop, something that you’re thinking about, you mentioned your spouse and a lot of authors are, are really solopreneurs, right? It’s them. Maybe they’ve got a virtual assistant, maybe they’ve got a friend or a spouse. They’re like an author buddy, but they don’t have big teams where they can send it around to 30 people and get him. How do you figure out like, Hey, I made this piece of content. Like, is this okay? Or do you kind of just post and pray? How does it work?

Jim Tobin (28:13.264)

I mean, if you’re on your own, you can let it go to tomorrow and then say, I’m going to look at this as somebody who doesn’t know me the best I can. Different people are going to have different capability of doing that. But also, do you have a friend who’s a little more risk averse and a friend who’s a little more wild asking both of them, or at least asking the risk averse friend, you think this is going to hit the way I think it’s going to hit?

Ferol Vernon (28:37.231)

Hahaha!

Jim Tobin (28:41.856)

you know, those sorts of things would be wise. And if, you know, if you’re not sure, you don’t have to, particularly if you’re getting anything that’s gonna insult, you know, a wide group of people, it takes a lot of art to pull that off. There’s some comedians who can pull that off. That’s probably not you. So if you’re insulting a large group of people, I would probably take a different approach.

Ferol Vernon (28:57.938)

Right. Right.

Ferol Vernon (29:05.179)

Okay, yeah, that makes sense and wise words. So Jim, we talked a lot about like trending, kind of like what’s working today and what you’re seeing, kind of like as you look over, you know, 2026 and into 2027, like what trends do you think are gonna be coming up? What should the sort of small marketer of the world keep their eye on as things are developing?

Jim Tobin (29:26.928)

You know, predicting trends is really tough, but I can say that for now and for the foreseeable future, I think using trends, trending audio, trending video, and putting your own spin on it, whether it’s, know, you’re pretending you’re a character of one of your books, mouthing a trending audio clip or acting it out, or, you know, you as an author.

dealing with a frustration in a funny trending audio clip, doing duets or replies to, so that’s taking someone else’s clip and putting your reply or reaction to it. Those sorts of things are going to continue to work for a while. Now, big brands can get sued for using something they don’t have the rights to. I think it’d be very unlikely, not impossible.

for an author to get sued for that. I think the worst case scenario is you get a request to take it down. Most cases people would consider it, I think, if it’s satire or it’s fair use. So big brands don’t have some of that protection, but hashtag not a lawyer. But I think using trends and responding to trending content can give you a leg up.

Ferol Vernon (30:28.136)

Sure.

Ferol Vernon (30:49.373)

Got it, okay, perfect. And then, know, I always like to kind of, as we get towards the end here, I like to talk about tactics because that’s one of the things like when we look in the comments and we talk to authors, they’re like, that was really cool, but like, how do I do this? So talk to me a little bit about like the tools. this like, let’s say I want to start creating some social content, I’m comfortable making a video or two. Am I just using my phone? Do I need to buy some stuff? And then like, what kind of software do I use? Like, what am I getting myself into here?

Jim Tobin (31:17.968)

We shoot a lot of content on phones for our clients. do have the SLR, I guess they move passage, we have the nice digital cameras as well. And we have some other like the Osmo with the things so it doesn’t move. We have all that stuff, but we still use phones a decent amount of time. I think the quality on phones now is generally 4K, which is more than you need. And so I think you should feel comfortable using your phone, particularly as you’re getting started.

Ferol Vernon (31:39.367)

Yeah.

Jim Tobin (31:47.005)

And then there’s a lot of good tools. Instagram has edits, which is supposed to help you use some templates and things. TikTok has CapCut, which you can use. You don’t have to use it only on TikTok. I prefer CapCut. I think it’s a little further advanced. I would say though that CapCut can make some really polished looking stuff. Be careful that you don’t over polish. think…

somebody sees something that looks like it was done by an art director or whatever, they’re like, this isn’t real social content, they can skip it. So just because it’s zoomy and it has 57 effects on it doesn’t mean it’s going to work better than simple scene, scene, scene, scene edits that you could do yourself. We do things in Adobe on desktop, you know, sometimes because we have to get very precise, but I think doing some basic stuff on your phone is a good way to start.

Ferol Vernon (32:41.309)

That’s great. Okay, cool. And then let’s say I’m an author and I have, I’m willing to dedicate 30 minutes a week. That’s it. 30 minutes a week to my social media presence. I know that’s not a lot, especially for somebody who lives in this world all the day, but how should I think about spending that 30 minutes? What’s like the most important way I could spend?

Jim Tobin (33:02.104)

It’s creating content, number one, because you’ll be surprised how much time content creation can take. You may have to do it, or you may stumble on your words and find yourself doing it five times and now you’re getting sweaty. The editing is probably going take you longer than the filming, even if it’s simple editing. So I would just try and at 30 minutes a week, I would try and create a piece of content, two pieces of content. would keep it low. The other thing I would factor in is

Ferol Vernon (33:14.816)

Hahaha!

Jim Tobin (33:31.429)

You know, everybody’s in the past was trying to get likes. If you can think about content that’s going to get you shares, the algorithm vastly rewards share content or like content. you know, content like there’s always the guy who, or we all have that one friend who, that’s what we all send to our friend. This is you, right? And so if you can get, if you can think about what content would someone share with their friend or their spouse or their

Ferol Vernon (33:41.23)

Interesting.

Ferol Vernon (33:53.21)

Yeah, you’re the guy.

Jim Tobin (34:00.465)

co-writer or whatever, if you can break that in the algorithm, you’re going to have some success.

Ferol Vernon (34:06.972)

Interesting, okay, that’s a great tip there. Okay, and then lastly, one of the things that we preach a lot here at Written Word Media, we’re big fans of email, always have been, and authors managing their own mailing list, we think is one of the most powerful tools that they can do. How do I think about, like I’ve got a mailing list of a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people, and then I’ve got my social. How do those two things play together? Those are two, kind of the big tools that a solopreneur has.

Jim Tobin (34:34.042)

Yeah, mean, social, you’re renting an apartment, right? And you can use a house you own. think periodically reminding people to move over to sign up for your email in social content is good. Now, remember that organic I talked about? In organic content on Instagram and TikTok, least, you can’t easily put a link. But if you boost the content, you can add links to paid content on both those platforms.

So doing that over to sort of a lead capture, you can also do contests and sweepstakes and promote people out to your site to, know, free copy of the book or, you know, whatever. It doesn’t have to be very expensive, but capturing email through getting people to come over and leave an email is very, very good. And then the other sort of in-between step that there’s some tools.

Ferol Vernon (35:01.433)

Interesting.

Jim Tobin (35:28.438)

There’s one called Stampede Social. There are others where if you can get somebody to comment with a particular word, then you can DM them a link to something. That can be really, really efficient. So look at Stampede Social as something you might want to sign up for. And then in your content, you just say, DM me this word. And anyone who leaves that word, now you’re DMing them anything you want. And so now you’re getting that connection and trying to.

now get off the social platforms.

Ferol Vernon (36:00.004)

That’s awesome. Okay, great. And so, you know, as we’re coming to a close here, what’s like, what’s the one biggest mistake that you see on social? doesn’t have to be for authors, but like, is, when you’re, when you’re doing your market research and you’re flipping through the feeds and you go like, gosh, I wish they would do that. What do you, what do you see right now that the people should stay away from?

Jim Tobin (36:19.76)

People try to, in all sorts of places, they try to make the sale with a piece of content, right? They try to take you through the problem, why they’re the solution, their covert objections. Now they’re at a minute 45. Like nobody wants that. Think about, or they want that when they’re way down the funnel, right? Maybe that’s a good piece of YouTube content, right? But to attract attention, first you have to people know you exist.

Ferol Vernon (36:36.248)

Yeah, once there, yeah.

Jim Tobin (36:44.44)

And so there’s something called the mere presence effect. If someone’s even aware you exist, they think better of you very, very quickly, even if they don’t know much about you. don’t think, I’ve got to set up and record this video and it’s got to be the history of Roman architecture, how it plays in my novel. No, like little snippets, 15, 30 second snippets over and over again.

will attract the people over time who are interested in Roman architecture, whatever it is you deal with, it will attract that niche over time. Don’t try and close the sale in a single piece of content.

Ferol Vernon (37:21.914)

Amazing, okay, got it. All right, well, Jim, thanks so much for sharing your expertise and your wisdom with us today. If people wanna find out more about what you’re doing, what should we check out?

Jim Tobin (37:34.096)

probably ignite social media.com or on Instagram, I’m JR Tobin. And I’ll share some stuff there too.

Ferol Vernon (37:42.806)

All right, authors, thanks for listening. Jim, thanks for being a guest. We appreciate you and keep writing and we’ll talk to you next week.