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Does investing time and effort in social media marketing still make sense?

I recently opened social accounts for Zenpen, but I'm flooded with bots instead of getting human engagement. On X 90% of the follows are bots. On Pinterest, most of the views are bots. This makes me think that some of the visits I see in my analytics are bots too.

Perhaps it‘s time to change marketing strategy and focus on quality link backlink building and focus on SEO. What do you think?

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IMO, bots don’t affect analytics (like engagement or views) much—just follower numbers. I’m no expert, but my "mentors" suggest trying out everything you can, then doubling down on what works. If that’s SEO, go for SEO.

For me, it’s LinkedIn, so that’s where I’m focusing my efforts.

Good luck! 💪

Also, here's an X-bot-remover script that I normally use every month. I like to keep my followers lean, not how many they are. github.com/maxmetcalfe/botrem…

Great strategy. That‘s more-or-less how I began. Now, it‘s time to narrow my marketing efforts to what works best. As for social media, at least I reserved the social handles precisely like I wanted, with the same consistent name, so in case I sell Zenpen, the owner will have every social channel under one name.

I personally believe you can't go wrong with SEO. It should always be part of your strategy, even if you do social media marketing, because it's a long-term strategy.

Based on your product description, I think you'd do pretty well on Threads. Possibly Instagram, if you create images with quotes from your site. You could add related images to dress it up in Canva if you wish. I'm surprised Pinterest doesn't do better for you, but Pinterest isn't necessarily social media -- it's part of a website strategy since it's designed as a visual search engine.

Not sure what the use case for your product is, though, besides a catalogue of quotes.

How do you envision people use this?

For now it‘s just me dumping in quotes that I‘ve gathered on my computer. If the site takes traction as it is, I‘m planning to help indie writers feature quotes from their books, and a link back to their books, so people can purchase them. I also have more ideas, but I‘ll leave them for further into the future.

If you do decide you want to share indie authors' quotes, let me know! I'm a copy editor for indie authors (and several publishers), and I'm really entrenched in those communities (as both an indie author and reader myself).

I'd be happy to help if I can! 😄

Oh, that would be lovely.

I assume most of the authors would not be specifically writing on philosophical and spiritual topics. That makes me think that I probably need to adjust the brand positioning for Zenpen to a more general, less zen-like niche. That way, I can open up the brand to all types of indie authors, as long as the quotes are deep and meaningful.

If this is a success, and I get lots of visits to the website, it should be valuable for authors to get exposure, and valuable for me, if I get royalties from the book sales because the links from the quotes point out to the source that can be purchased.