Using social media to grow your newsletter

How social media can help you find the readers for your newsletter.

‘Subscribe to me and I’ll subscribe back.’

It’s an increasingly common ‘strategy’ on Substack to try and find new subscribers. Does it work? Well, it might give you some vanity numbers. Will it translate to genuine readers of your newsletter with good open rates? No, it won’t.

Unfortunately this is the old age problem for all writers who are trying to publish their own work and it goes far beyond just newsletters. Self-publishing a novel, running a literary magazine, writers who need to market themselves must find the audience that wants to read them from somewhere.

One of the small problems with Substack is that it’s a lot of writers preaching to other writers. For some publications, such as the Freelance Writing Network, that’s not really an issue. I want writers, because the newsletter is aimed heavily towards supporting writers to find work and continue their personal development. But for other publications, this is more complicated.

For Substack newsletters - and many other platforms for that matter - you have to do all of your own marketing work. You can spend hours writing and refining a piece of work, but without marketing yourself I’m afraid that the only views are going to be yourself, and if you’re brave enough to share with those you love, a few family members and friends.

So instead of just shouting into the ether, how can you find readers for your newsletter? And not just that, but readers who’ll actually open you emails, read them and share? Well, I’ve got a few tips for you specific to social media - many of which have helped with me (and not just for the Freelance Writing Network, but for other publications too).

I understand that there are other routes to promote your work and I’m looking forward to covering these in future editions of Grow Your Newsletter.

Whichever social media you choose to utilise, it’s so important to drive new connections you make towards your newsletter. Include links, reply with related posts of yours, send friendly DMs pointing people in the right direction. There are many ways to use them as a tool for growth, but driving connections is especially important.

Twitter

One of the first things I did when I started this newsletter was open up a Twitter account. Thanks to Mr Musk, you can actually pay to increase your engagement (though take the word ‘thanks’ with a pinch of salt, given the constant flood of pornography sent to me via bots). I quickly paid for the mid-tier subscription, which is around £10 a month. Nothing particularly crazy, and quickly worthwhile by the paid subscriptions to the newsletter I gained from readers who found me via the site.

‘Twitter Blue’ for my newsletter has meant that my replies to others go directly to the top of their feed. Visibility improved. I was pretty relaxed about who I followed, so I would follow anyone who worked in the freelance writing field to begin with, as well as other writers. To turn Twitter followers into subscribers, it’s firstly important to build credibility. This meant that I needed to publish regularly each week and consistently share my posts on social media when they happened.

But Twitter itself is again filled with writers talking about writing, and not always readers themselves. For me it’s the best platform to utilise, for others it might not be. So how can you find potential readers there?

Well, first you want to navigate to the big hitters in your specific genre. I went for editors who commission a lot of freelancers and then found users who followed them or retweeted their posts as they were often the exact audience I wanted. When people followed me at first, I’d send a very friendly DM with a link to my newsletter. Sometimes this worked, other times it didn’t. Perhaps it was a little shameless, but for a while it was a useful growth strategy.