Four Steps to Social Media Emancipation

LUCY BURDETTE: Do you get the shakes if you think about going too long without checking Facebook or your Twitter feed? Are you terrified about missing out on the newest iteration of social media? Help is here! Our guest today, Chris Syme of CKSyme Media Group has some great suggestions for accomplishing more while doing less! Welcome Chris...

CHRIS SYME: We have lots of names for it: FOMO (fear of missing out), peer pressure, Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS), and more seriously, Internet Addiction Disorder. However we frame it, it can be debilitating for writers.

The amount of time people spend in front of screens is staggering: anywhere from 28 to 44 hours per week depending on the age group. If you write on a computer, your average number of hours per week is probably higher than that. According to Pew Internet, one-fifth of Americans report going online “almost constantly.” Social media use accounts for 28 percent of our online time, according to Social Times. And of that 28 percent, 22 percent is spent on Facebook and the other six percent is spread out over the various other channels.

We are distracted…and stressed.

Social media exacerbates the problem. The noise factor on social media is overwhelming. It’s almost impossible to be seen anymore online unless you already have a huge following or enjoy celebrity status. Too much information passes by too quickly. Eight years ago people were liking every Facebook page they could because it was the shiny new toy. In 2009, Facebook users liked an average of 4.5 pages. By 2013 it was up to 70 (Social Bakers). Add to that the average user has 338 friends. No wonder Facebook now has an algorithm.

So how does an author find success promoting and engaging on social media without spending all day trying? Contrary to everything you may have heard, my advice to authors is to pull back and quit trying to conquer every social media channel out there. The days of amassing followers and being everywhere are over. That is strategy from five years ago. Today, the trend in marketing is moving towards targeting more invested audiences. Less is more. You don’t have to be on every social media channel, just the right ones.

There are four steps to mastering this process of less is more:

1.     Finding your target audience with simple research. There are several ways you can do free audience research to define your target:

o   Use your Facebook Insights and check that data against other social media channel data you have

o   Use the Pew Internet Research 2016 social media update to look at the global data on social media use. Best resource, hands down.

o   Do a survey of your readers with a Google Form or free Survey Monkey survey to find out where your readers are. Send out links to your survey in email and in social media. You may want to offer an incentive such as a couple prizes to random responders.

2.     Designating your primary channel for engaging and selling. A primary channel is the one place where you engage personally with your readers AND earn the right to sell your books. For most authors that is a Facebook Author page.  There are five measures to use to find your best primary channel.

o   Find the best fit for your reader/audience demographics.

o   Look for the channel with the best overall global numbers. Consult Pew’s data for this. The answer is Facebook

o   Look for the channel with the best commerce tools or opportunities to buy a product without having to leave the platform.  Again, Facebook.

o   Look for the channel that is a good match for your genre. The difference between this measure and number one is that every channel that matches your demographic might not be a good match for your genre. For instance, if you’re a fiction writer LinkedIn may fit your reader demographic by age and gender, but in reality it’s a worthless channel for fiction writers.

o   Look for the channel with the best ability to help new readers find you and then convert them to a sale.

3.     Setting up outposts on other major social media channels that fit your audience where you only maintain a presence and redirect readers to your main channel. An outpost channel is a social media channel that doesn’t deliver the optimized opportunities of your primary channel but you still want to maintain a presence there. If you are already trying to engage on channels other than your primary channel, you’ll want to consider turning the rest into outposts. Have a presence but don’t engage.

4.     Learning how to craft more engaging content where you give more than you ask for and earn the right to sell. One of the chief pieces of learning to use less social media is to revamp your content strategy so that it offers value to your followers and earns you the right to sell without feeling sleazy.

You may need a paradigm shift. There are still be a lot of people out there who will tell you that you need to be everywhere, try everything. My objective is to teach authors how to spend less time marketing and more time writing. You don’t have to be on every social media channel, just the right ones.

You can dig deeper into this system in my new book, Sell More Books With Less Social Media. The book is accompanied by a free online course to help you learn how to implement the system. If you want to spend less time marketing and more time writing, this may be your path to freedom.

Chris Syme has logged over 20 years in the communications industry and is the principal of the award-winning agency, CKSyme Media Group. She is the author of four books on social media, including her newest Sell More Books With Less Social Media which also includes a free online class.  She is on Twitter as @cksyme, blogs at cksyme.com/blog and co-hosts a weekly podcast for authors with her USA Today bestselling daughter.

questions? comments? Chris will be stopping in over the day to answer them as she can...

Glenn Miller

JAN BROGAN:  Because of its ever evolving nature, social media always feels to me like one of those sci-fi monsters that is always changing its form. 

Today, we are lucky to have Glenn Miller, a freelance social media strategist here at Jungle Red to tame the monster by giving us a good idea of what he? she? it? actually looks like. 

Glenn has a varied career. He's been a genetic engineer, a computer programmer, a data warehouse expert, an author, a business found, a company president a chess coach, a grant writer and a charter school founder.

What they all have in common, he says, is that they required he learn to make words matter. 

Here, he makes words matter for our benefit. This is about the best advice I've seen anywhere for authors and anyone else who wants to understand and manage  the social media beast. I, for one, have already printed it out and posted it the bulletin board over my computer.

GLENN MILLER: I help fiction writers do social media.

Some of my clients are novelists; most are political candidates—and all have stories to tell, stories that need audiences. These days, writers augment their audience-finding process with social media. (At least, all the cool kids do.) But for the most part my clients would rather not be spending time on social sites at all, much less navigating the intricacies of facebook’s latest timeline modifications. So I help them be as efficient as possible. What you get below is the rough-and-tumble outcome of that.

The Social Landscape, with Cats

You might hear that you should find your personal comfort level, that you should do what’s right for you. According to prevalent chatter, each person has a unique social formula for success, and it’s your job to find your own.

Wrong!

You don’t have time to discover your own special sauce. You really don’t: you need to be writing. So here’s the social media prescription for writers in its briefest, starkest form:

·      Write good books, and lots of them. Nothing else matters if you skip this and focus on social media (or any other kind of) promotion.

·      Be on facebook because you have to, with a fan page in addition to your personal page. Otherwise, your limit of 5000 “personal” friends will eventually make you sad. Nobody likes sad. Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of social media, and a must-have. Here’s your recipe: Drop in at least 5 times per week. Act naturally. Have fun. Be yourself. Promote occasionally. Post cat pictures.

·      Be on pinterest because you want to. It's quick and fun. Also, your target  is here. Drop in at least 2 times per week, but not for more than 20 minutes. Post delightful images related to your genre or specific books. And cat pictures.

·      Skip twitter unless you want the flurry. It has some value as a traffic generator and connection engine (reporters are here; so is your agent), but also the highest learning curve and time commitment. And the drawback: harder to post cat pictures.

·      Build your own mailing list, for your newsletter, which you must have. No, really. (Not kidding.) ((If you thought I was kidding when I said, “Not kidding,” I wasn’t.))

·      Skip LinkedIn. Add Goodreads only if you want another (although useful) time sink. Pass on google+ for now. Post your pictures to facebook instead of Instagram. Make your website attractive to search engines.

·      Write more good books. And go take some more cat pictures.

Facing Facebook: Friends and Fans

We all just want to be liked.

It’s always been true; facebook just formalized the process. Your job is to capitalize on it, which means having a fan page, which you must do ahead of all other social media efforts. If instead you try to over-leverage your personal page you’ll find that your conversations are stilted, since your audience is a strange mix of faraway cousins, rabid readers, leftover high-school crushes, and motley hangers-on. Very motley. Plus, there’s that 5000-fan limit. Just make a fan page. And when you do, invite people from your personal page to Like it. That’s not desperate or pathetic behavior in the insular world that is facebook. It’s expected.

Recognize that your friend page (that’s you personally) and your fan page (that’s you professionally) are independent; unless a friend is also a fan, that friend does not see any fan page posts. That is, a friend of yours must first Like your fan page to get your witty and erudite writerly updates.

And yes, this means that if you have a topic appropriate for both audiences, you need to double post it.

But Who Are You?

You’ll have different content and different conversations depending on who you are on facebook. That is, depending on whether you are logged in as your personal page or your fan page. So you always need to know which of the two you are at the moment.

When you log in to facebook, it's as yourself. You verify this by noting the profile thumbnail picture on the top right of the menu bar. You can then choose to adopt the identity of your fan page by clicking the drop-down box adjacent to your name. Thus, the importance of having different profile pics for your personal page and your fan page: they let you know who you “are” at the moment.

Once you click your fan page, you become that—but since your personal page and your fan page are probably named the same, using the picture is the easiest way to differentiate at a glance.

That’s What I’m Talking About

Unlike in high school, on facebook you want people to talk about you, and lately facebook makes this even more visible with its “Talking About” metric, right there, next to your number of “Total Likes.” Taunting you. Telling you, when it’s low, that you just aren’t popular this week. Making you reach for your teddy bear and a tall Scotch. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

So do something about it. Rouse the rabble. Kick up some dust. Try these, recognizing that it's all voodoo anyway:

·      Ask for likes and shares. No, really. Just ask. Need a little love from time to time? Just ask for it.

·      Cats. (Also babies or dogs, in a pinch.)

·      Ask questions, occasionally using facebook's poll feature. Your fans want to be heard, but they are mostly too timid to pipe up. A poll gets past that.

·      Include a picture in almost every post. I know that words are your tools, but we humans are visual creatures. Don’t fight against this.

·      Spread the love. Occasionally share other posts from your newsfeed.

Old-School Marketing

I know you just really want to sell books. And all this social media rigmarole is swell and all, but how does it translate to sales?

Over the long haul it does. Each venue has a purpose: to drive traffic or create a conversion.

·      Facebook is where your readers are, especially your existing readers. Its job is to get readers to like you. So they will buy your books.

·      Pinterest is to get readers to your website.

·      Twitter’s value: making industry connections and driving site traffic.

·      Google+ is where good ideas go to die.

·      LinkedIn is where you give up writing and go find a soul-killing corporate gig.

·      Goodreads is to sell books. But street corners might be easier.

·      Your website is to sell books. And get names on your newsletter list. And pull in search traffic. And establish your brand. And give credibility.

All of this in sum creates a significant value: agents and publishers will adore you for having a pre-built fan base. This can be especially crucial if you are querying.

But even more practical is to get those names on your email list. You want results? Get them from your own old-school email list, which you should treasure as much as Scrooge McDuck does his pool of money. Get your visitors to sign up, and then send them content that reveals to them how smart they were for choosing to do so. Make them feel special, intimate, part of a secret club. And make the invitation prominent and easy.

And then go write more books.

JAN:  Glenn will be stopping by to answer your social media questions, so TAKE ADVANTAGE of his good nature while you can. You can also follow him on twitter     @glennjmiller

And come back tomorrow, when I interview documentary film-maker Heidi Sullivan on the art of telling true stories on film.