Posting updates with your community in mind
How to use public and private posts to engage with your community on Drip — and beyond.
Posts are one of the primary ways for you to interact regularly with your subscribers and creative community on Drip. These can be public (viewable by anyone online) or subscriber-exclusive (only viewable by certain subscription tiers).
You can use posts to share new work (including work in progress), ask for feedback, and deliver on your subscription tiers. Posts can include text, video, audio, images, and livestreams, so there’s a lot of leeway.
When you’re just starting out on Drip, figuring out what to post — and how often — can be tricky. Here, we break down some best practices.
Experiment with both public and private posts.
On Drip, public and private posts serve different purposes. Since public posts are viewable by anyone, they’re a great way to show potential subscribers what to expect if they subscribe to you on Drip. For example, the team behind Got a Girl Crush magazine uses public posts to announce their latest issues and contributors. (Fun fact: we often promote public posts in the Drip Dispatch newsletter.)
Private posts are one way to deliver on promised and exclusive content for your subscribers. (When publishing a post, you’ll have the option to limit it to a specific set of your subscribers.) You can also use private posts to poll subscribers for feedback on what else they’d like to see from you, and how often.
Post at your own speed.
There’s no magical number of times you should post on Drip each month. What matters most is setting clear expectations with your subscribers — for example, whether they’ll be hearing from you once a month or once a week — and meeting them.
That said, subscribers always love hearing from the creators they support. Aiming to post one to three updates per month is a great starting point.
Use pinned posts to highlight what’s important.
You can pin special public posts to the top of your feed (just like you can on other social platforms). Choose posts that illustrate for potential subscribers what you’re all about, like RiffTrax. (“If you’d like to learn more about how the sausage gets made, and get unprecedented insight into all things RiffTrax, then go ahead on and subscribe.”)
Feel free to swap our your pinned post(s) from time to time for new visitors to your page.
Look to fellow creators for inspiration.
Not sure what to put in your posts? Take a look at how fellow Drip creators are using them:
- Puppeteer and novelist Mary Robinette uses public posts to share writing advice and endearingly funny audiobook bloopers.
- Artist Azikiwe Mohammed uses public posts to share episodes of his collaborative podcast with fellow Drip creators Sean J Patrick Carney and Darcie Wilder.
- Science fiction and fantasy writer Amal el Mohtar shares transcripts from recent talks via public posts and uses subscriber posts to let her readers vote on what she reviews next.
For more advice, visit the Drip Creator Toolkit.
