Social media can be one of those necessary evils, especially for small businesses without a marketing staff to pull it all together for you. (This includes you, my author friends…). And when it’s last on your list, you can end up scheduling a few minutes of your day to go on your accounts and have a frenzied ten minutes of activity.
You’ll frantically push tweets or posts out. All at once. You’ll like everything you see in your news feed. You’ll follow a few people.
Raise Your hand if that sounds familiar. I won’t judge. (Okay, yes, yes, I will. But only a little.)
You’re out there, you’re making an effort, and that is huge. High Five Worthy Huge. You get the need to put yourself out there, and I love that about you. ❤
But for now, let’s focus on the tsk-tsk of drive-by posting.
I write this post with much love because I see it all the time.
What Not to do
I have an acquaintance I’ve done business with. She runs a blog tour company and helps authors reach their audience across the web. I’ll call her Velma. (So not her real name. Que the shadowed, blurred interview here.) Like you, she is ah-mazing.
But Velma’s social media schedule? Not so much. (Remember. This is love talking.)
I’m going to highlight her Twitter profile just to offer one example, but this goes for any network where you are tempted to drop a dump truck level of activity all at once. Velma’s Twitter profile can be completely silent for the majority of the day. Then, there will come a flurry of action. Post after post after post. After post.
In a ten-minute shot, fifteen posts will fill my timeline. Most of those posts are blog links or other business-related items. An unexpected assault right in the middle of my afternoon 6th cup of coffee, low-carb (when I really want sugar) snack time.
Sound familiar?
Every time I see this, I just want to send her a hug and some unsolicited advice. But since you’re here, I’m going with the “You asked” theory, and I’m going to reward you with a helpful tip, something that changed how I managed my social media.
Velma is doing what she thinks she must to make social media a part of her business (Go, Velma), but the way she’s doing it isn’t helping.
Especially with Twitter, your audience is never all going to be on in the same time. And chances are very very small that they are actively clicking to your profile page to see what you put out five hours ago, while they were busy in that three-hour meeting. They are doing their own drive-by checking of their timeline. A dozen or so scrolls down their current timeline is what most people check and then they move on.
Now. Imagine that for three scrolls, all they see are your posts.
Oh yeah. They’re probably channeling Cersei at this point. Chances are really strong they will scroll past ALL of your posts to get past that feeling of overkill.
They’ll miss everything you posted.
Do This Instead
You spend time on social media to connect with people, to put out content that people will want to see and click on.
Posting a gazillion and one messages all in one fifteen minute span isn’t going to do that.
Instead, you can use a tool like Buffer to schedule your tweets ahead. (You know I’d have at least one tech option to suggest, right?) Doing this will allow you to post your content in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, the wee hours after the bars are closed… all while you are soundly, well, doing something else. You can spend the same amount of your day posting —but those posts go out when your audience is actually online. (There’s a way to see that, too, but that’s for another day.)
Buffer has a free account, so it won’t even cost you money to improve your efforts. Then you can spend a little more time in the day just checking in with any responses and engaging with your followers, reading what they wrote, responding to their posts.
It’s more like, well, conversation. It brings the social back to your media. This small change could have a dramatic change in your interaction on social and truth be told, how much you enjoy your efforts, as well. Conversation is far more fun to participate in then a mass assault of promotion.
Good luck and I look forward to reading your post at all hours of the day! XOXO
