Using Social Media the Right Way

Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook can do wonders for you author platform building.

Beyond just getting started on Twitter or starting your personal Facebook profile, it is important to use the sites to your best advantage.

Marketing your book on these sites is a great idea for several reasons:

1. It is a great way to drive traffic to your blog or website which in turn will drive these new visitors to potentially buying your book
2. It helps you find a community of other authors or people interested in your topic to share information with
3. Low cost. Most of these sites are free and may be more beneficial than buying ad space.

There are a few things to keep in mind though. One thing to remember is that these are social sites, not selling sites. If all you do is shout "Buy my book!" into the virtual world, you are not likely to make friends or sales. That behavior is the social networking equivalent to telemarketers calling you while you eat dinner. No one really appreciates that kind of approach.

What you should be talking about on Twitter, Facebook, and even your blog is what you are doing with your book. If you are editing your book, a great snippet to Twitter or to put on your Facebook status would be: "Editing my book on moose antlers. Moose antlers are hard. Editing is harder."

Later on you can post a tweet or status update mentioning that a section of your book on moose antlers is up on your blog and then offer the web address so that people can go check it out.

Is your book already out? You can talk about all the feedback your are receiving. Positive or negative. Negative comments that you receive and then share with others will often garner lots of chatter and often can help you turn a bad experience into one of community support!

Remember that these sites are for socially interacting with other people. Not a way for you to corner them with your sales pitch. If you wouldn't do it at a dinner party (or wouldn't want it being done to you at a dinner party!) don't do it on social networking sites!

For tutorials on how to get started on Twitter and Facebook, download the PDFs below!

TwitterTutorial.pdf
FacebookTutorial.pdf

Twitter: You Have an Account, Now What?

You've figured out how to tweet. You've found some people to follow. And maybe, if you are interesting, they'll follow you back.

How on Earth are you supposed to want to sit at your desk always refreshing your browser window to see the updated tweets?

It isn't fun. I went looking for some other solutions. And looking through the pages on Google, there are a lot of options.

This particular blog offers a great synopsis of several options of applications to choose from to better use Twitter.

I personally prefer Twhirl. A free downloadable app, it puts the tweets in a feeder form so that the most recent one is on top and as tweets come in, it automatically refreshes the feed. I have mine set to refresh every 30 seconds. It floats on my desktop instead of having a cumbersome browser window open. I also like that I can change the color scheme to separate out my direct messages, my @replies and my basic feed.



After exploring a bit more (there really aren't viable manuals for most of these things that I know of. You just click the button and hope for success!) I found that I could click on a Twitter ID and decide to follow (or remove) them, see their feeds, reply to them and some other handy buttons.

Another that I am poking around at is TweetDeck. Some may prefer the wider layout and the column style separations of @replies, tweets, and direct messages.



Frankly it gives me a headache.

For anything you might want to do, there is a way on Twitter. You just have to investigate.

For example, I didn't understand "hashtags" which look like this: #

What these do is allow twitter users to find others talking about a topic. They act like a search marker for twitter users. So, for example, if I wanted to talk to a group of twitter friends about my love of the movie "Legally Blonde," I could put a tweet up that looked like this:

WheatmarkBooks: Hey, anybody want to talk about #legallyblonde?

And anyone who wanted to would add the #legallyblond in their response. I could then search on search.twitter.com for people who have used that "hashtag" to follow the conversation.

The response might look like this:

@KatMeyer: ZOMG! I love #legallyblonde.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Twitter has a wide variety of uses that can go from simply reaching out to others, to defining entire "cults" as our author, Michael Druxman, put it.

Keep at it and if you have questions, you can DM me at Twitter ID WheatmarkBooks.

Entering the Blogosphere

I've had several requests lately for blog starting instructions. For lots of people, starting anything on the computer, particularly the Internet, can be a daunting task riddled with the fear of breaking something, opening yourself up to scams, and signing up for something you never intended to.

So for our Wheatmark authors who are just getting started, here is a step-by-step blog about, well, blogging.

I'm going to go through the steps screen-by-screen on Blogger, a free blog hosting site through Google, that will allow you to get started!

Remember, this is just to get started. There are so many ways to customize your blog to work for you. There are other services out there like that have fee sites that have even more options. But when you are just getting started, this is an easy and pain-free way to go.

1. Go to https://www.blogger.com/start
   
2. On the opening page, (called a landing page is web-ese) is a giant orange arrow that says “create your blog now”
   
3. Click it.
   
4. It will ask you to create a Google account. Do this. It isn’t a scam. In fact, it will be helpful in the future to have one.
   
5. Now you name your blog: I recommend calling it something easy to remember. The title of your blog does not need to be the same as the URL. I think this is kind of confusing. (For example, my personal blog where I post picture of my dogs and things when I remember is entitled I Like Carrots. But my actual URL is http://katgautreaux.blogspot.com/ because I Like Carrots was apparently taken.) So you may want to call your blog something entirely different from your address that is typed into the search line on your web browser’s window. This is up to you and the availability.
   
6. The next prompt is choosing a template. I like the minima template to begin with because it is nice and clear to see.
   
7. The next prompt will say "Start blogging!" And you click on the arrow.
   
8. Click it!
9. Before you write anything, let’s spice up the blog just a wee bit.
   
10. Go to the Setting tab.
    

SETTINGS TAB

1. Write a description that includes some keywords you might use to search for you or your book; put them in sentence form if you like.
   
2. All those options! Everything should be a yes except for the adult content. I'll let you decide that one. But unless you've written about a very, very adult topic, you should make that a no.
   
3. Save
   
4. See Formatting? Go there. Make sure the time stamps and such are correct for your time zone. Also, “turn on” Show Link Fields
   
5. See Commenting? Go there. I like blogs to be as open as possible for books. So answer the questions to make that happen. Allow anonymous commenters. I’d select the pop-up option in how the comments are viewable. Everything else should be OK the way that it is.
6. See email? Go there. Here is where you can selectively e-mail people when you’ve posted.
   
7. Permissions --If you have more than one person who is going to author posts on your blog--Go there. Then add authors. If it is just you, leave it.
8. OK! One more tab! Click on the Layout tab.

LAYOUT TAB

1. Here is where you can add things to help readers navigate your blog, link to other blogs, change colors, etc. This is the fun part of decorating your blog.
   
2. Add a Gadget: Under Add a Gadget, you can create a list of blogs and websites that you enjoy and would like to tell others about. (be sure to add Wheatmark!)
   
3. Subscription Links, add this so readers can subscribe and be updated when you post
   
4. List, Link List. Are great ways to show our support of others out there on the web (and how they can in return show support for you)
   
5. Fonts and Colors: Here you can change your text colors and such to match your eyes, your shoes, or your book. This is fun, but not important

NOW YOU CAN POST

When you are done setting up the basics, you can begin blogging. By clicking the “new post” button it will open up a page for you to write in.

What each blog should have:

A title

Body text

Labels (words that help readers identify your subject and be able to search it – like a library catalog

What each blog CAN have:

Video uploads

Links to other websites and such

Pictures