Using Planoly for Your Author Platform

Over the last few years, I've worked hard to adopt media minimalism into my life. Despite all of the obvious and wonderful advantages of connecting with the writing community online, social media has always resonated as unconsciously toxic in a variety of ways.

The "scroll hole" is something everybody with a human brain is susceptible to. In fact, brain scans now confirm that the dopamine overload inspired by social media, especially for users with a relatively large following, is capable of not only breaking reward pathways in the brain, but rewiring it altogether in a way that's uncannily similar to those with drug dependencies.

For these reasons, and others, I have been exploring ways to keep my author platform active without subjecting myself to the temptation of the "scroll hole" — and thus far, I have really enjoyed Planoly. This third party software is perfect for social media management in that it's capable of cross-posting to every platform (from your smartphone or your desktop) with one click of a button, and without being on the platform itself. I absolutely love the layout as well as the functionality of Planoly, so I figured I'd share it with all of you! :)

Here are a few screenshots of the desktop version, which is my favorite:

Below is my latest post on Instagram, and the first time I've officially tried cross-posting with Planoly. One of the biggest pitfalls in the scheme of my author platform is that I'm only ever really active on Instagram (and even that's iffy). My page on Facebook has 100 followers even though I never post there. What if I started posting there, though? What if I engaged with the followers there even just a little more?

In the name of selling more books, I think it's worth a shot! So far, so good.

I love that Planoly has a whole center for hashtags, too. Here's an example of two collections I've made. I've fallen completely behind on SEO and whatnot — so I will have to do a little more research on what hashtags are most advantageous, as I'm sure right now they're basic and ineffective — but still. How awesome and organized and time-saving is this? Love it.

The only thing that may be a concern is that Planoly isn't necessarily free. Sure, there's a free option, but that doesn't allow for cross-posting on Facebook — which is one of the reasons I want software like this: to avoid every platform as much as humanly possible, while staying as active as possible, and saving as much time as possible.

For now, I figure I'll give it a spin for a month and see how that goes. If it has drastically made my life easier, it's worth the money. Before this, I was using Instagram, Preview, and a caption formatter for one single post (on Instagram). That approach was extremely time consuming and obviously flawed, so this has acted as a drastic improvement.

If you're on the fence about this, that's totally okay! I'll be checking back in a month from now to report on my experience. But if you'd like to jump in immediately (maybe one of your New Year's goals is to build an author platform, like one of my goals is to rebuild the platform that I've allowed to slowly die over the last few years), then let's keep in touch on our experiences. I'd love to report yours to the group as well, a month from now! :)

Until then, let me know if you're already using a social media management program! Which one do you use, and why? What do you like most about it? I think it'd be fun to compile a list of everyone's top favorites and go from there.