This post was written by fellow writer, K. Caffee, who has published “Out Of Darkness” and “Remember The Shadows,” the terrific first two novels in her “Followers Of Torments” series. A big thank you to her for generously contributing this post and providing me with a great deal of help as I try to figure out the ins and outs of social media.
Everyone has probably heard that you have to have a blog. That you need to be involved on multiple other social media platforms, and that you need to be active. Coming up with good content for your blog can be tough. Coming up with content for those other platforms can be even tougher – especially when those platforms are short to mid-term information sites.
Blog Content
Blog content is your bread and butter. Take your time to develop a sound theme to present to the world. Sure, when you first start the idea of generating content is going to be daunting, and you will probably wander all over the place while you work on developing your voice and blogging style. Don’t worry about this, yet.
Take the time you need to develop your blog. Don’t skimp, and don’t try to take short cuts. As I said, this is the heart of your platform. As you begin to refine where you want to go, it may be a good idea to begin developing a page for your own reference. This doesn’t have to be published, or even available to your followers. What you want to list here are your posts that are relevant to what your author’s “brand” is – articles about your characters, articles relevant to your work, articles about the work itself, and if you reach out to other authors or artists – list those projects here as well. . It is an organizational tool for you to use when re-purposing your content for other platforms.
Once you have established your theme and blogging style, not to mention your blogging schedule, then it’s time to start thinking about other platforms. If you’ve been building on those along the way, you are already ahead of the game. I started with just my blog, so that is the path I’ll be describing.
Facebook Content
The easy way to develop Facebook content is to have your blog flow through to either your author’s fan page, or to a dedicated author’s profile. You do not want to mingle your personal page with your author’s page. As you grow your fan base, you will start losing the ability to interact with your friends and family. Right now, I have an Author’s page only. I may decide to set up a dedicated profile, but it is not worth the effort, because I have such a small following.
Reusing your blog content on Facebook is a convenient way to gain people’s attention, and draw them in. Since most links will have the first sentence or two displayed, along with a link when it shows up, this gives you a ready made post. However, you will want some other original material to show up here. Just to reward your Facebook fans for being… well… fans.
That is a post all by itself.
Twitter Content
Because twitter has been my fastest growing following, and has generated the most interest in my work, I am going to focus on this platform quite heavily. For starters, you will need to decide what type of tweeter you want to be. Do you want to use image tweets, or text tweets
- Image tweets – use pictures with text on them to get across some of your message. This is a very convenient way to post about upcoming books, blog posts, or provide longer quotes. After all, an image is supposed to be worth a thousand words, right?
- Text tweets – Your basic, every day tweet. Anyone can write them, anyone can post them. These are the most common type of tweet.
You’ve decided which type of tweet to go with – at least to start. You can always mix and match later as your skills develop. What you will need is at least 30 high content blog posts. You can probably start with less, but it will make the scheduling part a bit more difficult, depending on your blogging schedule. You will also need at least one third party tweet scheduler. I prefer hootsuite, though I also will use tweetdeck. I did this because tweetdeck does not offer any analytics, and hootsuite does. Also, hootsuite has a paid version that allows you to bulk upload your tweets when you are ready, but the free version is extremely versatile while you are getting your feet wet. The only down side that may send me out looking for other options is the fact that hootsuite does not allow you to post pictures from their platform.
- Tweetdeck – I use this one for the limited number of image tweets I have. Most of these are pure self-promotion, so this is not a major part of my tweet schedule.
- Hootsuite – text base tweets, and the main platform I use to schedule from. It can also schedule into your Facebook feed if you so choose.
Now, down to the nuts and bolts of how to make all of this come together.
- From your blog, select the high content tweets. To make it easier, you may wish to copy the links out to something like notepad, excel, or word. Personally, I like to use notepad.
- Write the interest sparking text of your tweet. Necessary for either picture or text based tweets. Keep this in the 30 – 40 character range if possible
- Decide what type of schedule you want to tweet on. When I first started scheduling, I sent out 2 tweets per day for a total of 12 tweets. I alternated the tweets every hour, and had a “dead” time between 11 PM CST and 4 AM CST. As I gained more comfort with scheduling, I extended my times until I started at 2 AM CST. However, I noticed I wasn’t getting engagement all day. I have since changed to rotating through 8 tweets with each tweet going out 3 or 4 times per day. I still have a “dead” time between 10 PM CST and 2 AM CST. Eventually, I will probably forgo this, and develop my schedule to run continuously.
- Copy your tweet into the tweet box, and run the link through the link shortener. Since twitter does not allow exact duplicate tweets, each time you send out a tweet, you have to change something. For tweets containing links, this is easy – the link shortener provides a different link every time it shortens, even if it’s going to the same URL. (Cheater’s way of getting around the duplicate issue.)
- Fill in your schedule, and you are good to go. I choose to try to keep at least 2 weeks of tweets scheduled.
- Make sure to spend a little time every day on twitter in person. Yes, you’ve got your tweets scheduled, but the human interaction is very important. It keeps twitter from flagging your account as a bot, and it lets your followers know that you are a real person.
In closing, reusing your blog content is a great way to create content for multiple platforms. For most, the blog will have the slowest growth. When you select content to reuse, keeping it fresh is almost as important as keeping it quality and consistent.
Each platform needs something to let your followers there know you appreciate them. For me, I choose to use selections from my blog that are at least a week old. I tend to post something every other day at a minimum, more often if I have guest posts, or book reviews. So, pulling from the older posts provides regular content that is probably new to my followers on twitter. However, my blog followers get the “breaking” news first, and have a chance to comment, like, or ignore it before anyone else. I have one series of posts that I send to Facebook and not twitter, so the two platforms do not have the same content posting all the time. Only the day that a post goes “live” is there simultaneous content. However, twitter’s constant babble swamps out the post almost before it’s posted, and Facebook can lose the post within a few days. So, when I resurrect it a month or so down the line on either platform, it is still new.
How do you reuse your blog content? I’m always interested to learn new ideas and incorporate better strategies over on Pukah Works.
To see more from K. Caffee and checkout her books, you can find her at:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PukahWorks
FB : https://www.facebook.com/PukahWorks
Blog: https://pukahworks.wordpress.com/
GR: https://www.goodreads.com/KCaffee
Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/kcaffee
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/KCaffee
2 Responses
David,
Thank you so much for hosting, and I am terribly sorry it’s taken me so long to realize I hadn’t said that. (Blame school.)
It was fun doing this, and really helped me to understand my own process better. Hope it helped.