In a perfect world, all writers would have ample free time to manage their social media profiles and turn their online author platforms into marketing machines.
Many aspects of social media are organic. People will “Like” your Facebook page even when you’re not sitting at your computer. They will tweet and retweet your content while you’re sleeping. This, at the end of the day, is the crux of why social media has become so pervasive and important to our society. It’s instant interaction without needing to be sitting face-to-face.
As with most things in life, patience is a virtue when it comes to social media, not unlike tending to a seed you’ve planted without giving in to the urge to overwater it for faster growth. You won’t see much activity when you first start out, but don’t let that discourage you! The more you tweet, post, blog, and interact with potential readers and other writers, the wider your network will become.
The truth of the matter is that most of us have day jobs and our free time is limited at best.
Even if you can’t tweet every ten minutes, you can benefit from having social media profiles. A little extra technology can go a long way in terms of streamlining the process.
Here are some helpful tools that will make your social media life a whole lot easier.
Twitter, in all of its short-form glory, moves at a faster pace than some people can handle. Planning ahead is often the best strategy when it comes to keeping your Twitter profile up to date and on your followers’ radars.
If you know exactly what you want to say but can’t always find the time to say it, schedule your tweets ahead of time using a tool like SocialOomph. You can also use it to automatically send direct messages to new followers and even connect it to your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, adding extra automated power to your efforts.
TweetBeep
Once you have your tweets scheduled, you want to make sure you’re on top of any conversation that follows. You could install a Twitter application on your smartphone to keep an eye on your interactions, but who wants to be staring at a phone all day? And what if you don’t have a smartphone?
Enter TweetBeep. This nifty little tool will keep track of any @ mentions, replies, and even links to your website and alerts you via e-mail on an hourly basis. That way, you never miss a chance to interact with your dedicated followers!
Streamline Your Socializing: Kill Two Birds With One Stone
Maybe you prefer Facebook’s customizable newsfeed to that of the often frenzied Twitter. Or perhaps Twitter’s dedicated Interactions page appeals to you more than Facebook’s notification system.
Either way, the most successful author platforms make use of both social networks, and personal preference is no excuse to ignore one or the other.
The good news is, there are multiple ways to connect Facebook and Twitter to automatically post from one to the other.
If you would rather tweet, you can set up your Twitter profile to automatically post to Facebook via Twitter’s profile settings. Or if you’re not into Twitter but love Facebook , there’s a Facebook app that will post your Facebook activity onto your Twitter feed.
In other words, if you play your cards right, you can invest your time in one social network but reap the benefits of two.
There will come a time when word-of-mouth will become a huge part of how people stumble onto your social media profiles and, ultimately, your website. Until then, make life a little easier for yourself by using the aforementioned tools so you can save your free time to do what you really love to do—write!
QUESTION: Which promotional tools do you use when expanding your social media presence?
Good information…I’m always looking for updated ways to communicate.
This article is really helpful for people who just don’t have enough time to post every day.
For my WordPress website, I use a publicize option that automatically publishes my blog posts to my twitter feed, and my Facebook page
That helps me save a whole lot of time that could be spent writing : )