Social Media

Social Media Tips

1-Make your site interesting. Add cover art, etc.

2- Be consistent. Whether it’s once a day, once a week, or once a month, develop a schedule that others can rely on.

3. Be focused- become an expert in your genre so that those looking for information on your topic will start to think about you first.

4. Add pictures. It catches the eye, and transmits more information in a shorter amount of time than words.

5- Keep it Clear- Make it easy for people to contact you/find your books once they’ve discovered you.

Other success tips based on a webinar by Guy Kawaski

1.       Start yesterday. If you can, then you want about 5000 followers by the time your book is released.  That means 9-12 months of hard work.

2.      Know the Services.  Facebook is good with utilizing the network of people you already know.  Twitter is a way to blast out to the world and will affect how people perceive you, but it is not the best forum for interacting with people.  Google plus helps you to create contacts with people who share your passion-who you didn’t know before. Pinterest is good for visual people projects: Photography/art/food.  Linked in is good for more business-like, scholarly interactions. 

3.      Make a Great Profile People make snap judgments based on your profile.  Create an interesting cover photo that gives people an idea about what you are passionate about, and have your picture on there as well.  You want people to perceive you as “trustworthy,” “likeable,” and “competent.”  Think of your taglines as a thirty second elevator pitch about yourself.  He also recommends linking everything to you as the author so if you write multiple books, you don’t have to try to maintain each of those sites separately (too time consuming). 

4.      Curate and Link. Use your creative juices to write your stories.  You need to keep active, however, so take advantage of other’s hard work and post links to interesting stories/articles/pictures that you find.  (Guy personally uses my.Alltop.com to help him navigate the web as he searches for interesting stories.)  The idea is to help position yourself as an expert in your subject.

5.       Cheat.  If nothing looks interesting to you, look at what is hot/trending and share those.  Try to fins the original link if you can versus re-sharing. 

6.       Restrain yourself.  Provide mostly great content with a small amount of time towards self-promotion.  (Only 1/20 posts should be solely about getting people to buy your book.)

7.       Add Bling If you can, add pictures or videos with every post.  Don’t just use the automatic pictures, however.  Grab from the original source and use that.  (Don’t forget to give proper credit to the photographer.) 

8.       Always Respond to the Comments.  Plan on spending 2-3 hours a day on social media.

9.       Stay Positive, or Stay Silent.  If someone criticizes your work/comment, then don’t argue with them about it.  It’s okay to defend your work/self once, but no more than that.  Angry, bitter people don’t sell as many books.

 10.   Tap the crowd Solicit feedback from people.  This involves trusting the crowd to not steal your work, and trusting yourself to be able to produce your work better than they could anyway.  He, personally, gives people a google doc link (locked-no comments/modifications allowed) to his outlines, and asks people to respond to his work via comments under his post about it, or by e-mail.  He later asks who wants to read/crtitique an early draft (will send via e-mail) and when his work has been perfected, he asks who wants a PDF copy.  This later gives him a list of people who have read his work, and he can later ask them to review his work the day it goes on sale to the public.   

11.   Repeat.  Try to post 3-10 times a day, but know that it’s okay to repeat your best thoughts/ideas-especially on twitter.  The best times to post are between 7am and 7pm Pacific Standard Time.  When he posts an item once, an average of 600 people click on it.  If he posts it 4 times (8 hours apart), then the average number of people clicking on his site is 2400.   Note: it doesn’t work as well on twitter. 

Afterthoughts.  He was not a fan of blogs or websites usually.  Tumbler is an exception, because it’s connected similarly to Google plus. He primarily focuses on his google plus account and compares it to a shopping mall retail location because of its inherit threading, sharing, plus one, anti-spam features, etc.  He then likes twitter and then facebook.  (Although he subcontracts his other account updates.)  A feature he likes on Google plus is a “do share” features that lets you write your post whenever, but it will let you post it whatever time to want to.  He uses Bufferapp.com to help schedule posts for twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.

He uses “Snap pro x” to cut out the pictures and then uses “jump cut” to hold the links and pictures he will paste into his post.    

He has never paid for advertising, and definitely doesn’t recommend paying for reviewers.  But to help you get started, he recommends you go and find people who share your passion.  Look at the big dogs in the arena and respond to their posts.  Maybe suggest similar articles/pictures and include the link in your comment.