Streamlining Social Media

Streamlining Social Media It’s a familiar song to many writers: to increase book sales you need to build an online platform that includes a website and social media accounts. But if you’re unfamiliar with the various social networks and their settings, the learning curve can be quite steep. Aside from hiring a social media manager, there are ways to streamline the process of posting fresh content, as well as monitoring activity relevant to your writing. Here are a few tips to get you started: 1. Add widgets and plugins to maximize social media. For self-hosted WordPress websites, add widgets to showcase your presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Look for JetPack, an all-in-one plugin with social features. Know of a website that’s doing exactly what you want to do? Send them a message to find out what plugins they are using. 2. Use a dashboard service to monitor your accounts. In the same way a car’s dashboard tells you what’s happening with your vehicle, a social media dashboard tells you what’s happening across multiple social networks. HootSuite.com is one of the most popular dashboard services, as its free version allows users to import up to five social media accounts for monitoring and posting. Set up tabs for each social media account, then add streams for various content, such as Facebook Page posts, Twitter mentions, and more. You can even add a WordPress app to write and publish blog posts directly from HootSuite. 3. Take advantage of cross-posting. Once you’ve imported your social networks into HootSuite, you can post simultaneously across several social media accounts 4. Create Twitter lists based on your genre. Are you writing science fiction? Paranormal romance? Keep up with other writers in your genre 5. Monitor conversations using hashtags. Twitter popularized the hashtag, a search term/phrase preceded 6. Schedule posts and tweets in advance. Set aside 30 to 45 minutes a week to write content you can post across Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Then copy and paste each post into HootSuite, select one or more networks to post from, and use the scheduling function to determine the day and time for each item to be posted. 7. Write and schedule evergreen promotional content. Rather than inundate your audience with â€Å"buy my book† posts and tweets, schedule your promotional posts to go out every 8-10 hours. Have several books for sale, or working on multiple projects? Mix it up: Devote weekdays to project posts and weekends to promoting your book.