As a kid, the day the Scholastic flyer arrived was Amanda Lai’s personal Christmas. She grew up a total bookworm, the type who would stay up past bedtime reading by flashlight under the covers.
Fittingly, Lai, 27, now steers the social identity of one of the most prominent companies in the publishing world, Wattpad, which hosts stories written by everyone from total unknowns to a-list authors like R.L. Stine and Margaret Atwood.
It’s a position she relentlessly campaigned for. Two years ago, Lai was working as a consultant for brands like Oreo, Kellogg’s and Cashmere at Strategic Objectives, where she’d first worked as an intern while finishing her masters degree in professional communications.
She liked the work, but wanted a job that aligned more closely with her passions, so she set her eyes squarely on Wattpad. She repeatedly applied online, set up informational interviews and hunted down the Wattpad team at a tech job fair (“I stalked them,” she laughs), eventually convincing the company to bring her on as its first social media hire in May 2014.
Right away, she assessed the media company’s social footprint and significantly shifted the strategy. Knowing Wattpad’s user base is divided by preferred genre, she launched new Twitter accounts to focus on Wattpad’s most popular areas: fan fiction, 18+ romance and science fiction.
She also tailored content for every platform to suit their respective users. The teens on Tumblr now get fan fiction posts, while moms on Pinterest are served romance. On Instagram, she replaced the slice-of-life office photos the team had been posting with graphics that feature quotes from Wattpad stories or notable fan posts she gleans from social listening (example: “Some days I only have Wattpad for breakfast.”)
The strategy has paid off handsomely. In her first year, Lai doubled Wattpad’s social following across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Her efforts are likewise showing hard results for Wattpad – since February, she has doubled the number of Wattpad visitors that arrived via Facebook month over month, delivering on one of the company’s key metrics.
As sole social specialist (Wattpad doesn’t employ an agency for any of its social efforts), Lai reports into the company’s global head of marketing and acts as strategist, community manager and content creator. She also supports the marketing team on new business pitches, providing regular reports showcasing how Wattpad users demonstrate the behaviour advertisers are after. For example, she recently used social listening to show users were tweeting about reading Wattpad while eating chips, helping the company land Frito-Lay as a client.
Among Lai’s other social wins are her collaborative promos with Wattpad writers. Some tap the power of Wattpad’s popular writers outside the literary mainstream, like the weekly influencer Twitter chats she facilitates, while others tap the fame of mainstay writers to bring new users to Wattpad.
For example, a recent Twitter chat with R.L. Stine earned 13 million social impressions. For that promotion, she handed over Wattpad’s Twitter to the author, which she was initially nervous about, but “you make an exception for R.L. Stine,” she says.
When she speaks about the Twitter chat, it’s clear Lai has found the marriage of her reading obsession and PR skills she was after. And the fact that she now DMs back and forth with one of the world’s most well-known authors is enough to make any bookworm slime green with envy.
