"...this book is a must for every writer who wants to sell books!"
What is time suck? It’s the hours of time you can unintentionally spend in front of your computer reviewing Facebook posts, retweeting your Tweeps, and uploading photos while your writing and maybe even your family await your undivided attention.
We've all lost time while using Facebook.
Perhaps our only intention was to post an update and an image, but then … look
what happens instead? You see a post from a friend who is feeling down, so you
stop to write an encouraging note. Then you notice that a colleague posted a
great article about self-publishing, and you can't resist the temptation to
read it. You navigate to the website with the article and you find a book for
sale there. You've got to have it. So you go to Amazon, read the reviews, and
decide whether you want a new or used version or an eBook.
You eventually return to Facebook, upload
your image, and write the update. How much time have you lost? Thirty minutes?
Maybe an hour?
Who has the time for that? Getting lost in the vortex of time suck is
easy, and it’s the greatest fear among writers who are new to social media. But
there are remedies.
Four-Step
Cure to Social Media Time Suck
There are four basic principles to social
media that you can follow:
1.
Curation – Set a timer and
spend five to 10 minutes each morning scouring the Internet, websites such as
Alltop for the best information to share in your niche. Or use a curation
application such as Scoop.it, Paper.li or Google Trends.
2.
Schedule – No one has the
time to spend all day – or long chunks of time – at their computers posting
content to their social media profiles. Use an application such as Hootsuite,
TweetDeck (for Twitter only), or Buffer schedule your posts, tweets and updates
throughout the day. With Buffer and Hootsuite, you can schedule your Facebook
posts; however, Facebook has its own scheduling feature right within the status
update box on your Facebook author page.
3.
Socialize – Use your mobile
device in the evening while you relax to check your social media accounts.
Spend 15 minutes commenting, sharing posts, retweeting and re-pinning on
Pinterest. Consciously schedule this time into your day and enjoy it –
virtually. If you’re concerned about the clock, set your timer again so that
you don't lose track of time.
4.
ROI – Once a week schedule
some time to review your statistics to analyze your return on investment (ROI).
Indicators will include statistics on engagement, influence, and demographics,
and enumerate the number of new likes you received on your Facebook page,
retweets, new followers and other measurements. Use this information to gauge
your success and understand which messages work best with your audience.
Social
Media vs. Broadcast Media
Television and radio programs are
considered broadcast media. They tell us what their messages are. In the case
of TV, with few exceptions, there isn’t any room for viewer feedback or
conversation unless you consider what happens on the Maury Povich Show
conversation. Talk radio includes listener views but the environment is still
controlled by the producer and the host.
Social media is the first form of media
that emphasizes and rewards conversations. You now have the opportunity to talk
with your readers, learn about them, and empathize with them. Writers who don’t
schedule time to be social on Facebook or Twitter are turning a social platform
into broadcast media. If you simply broadcast your messages – “Buy my book!” –
you won’t be rewarded in website visits or book purchases. However, if you
allot time for talking with your readers via social media, you will gain loyal
followers who, in many cases, will help to market your books.
You can schedule 15 minutes at the end of
your day for thanking your retweeters (Twitter followers who re-post your
messages), commenting on your friends and fans’ posts, and interacting with
your growing body of contacts. Use this time to engage with other writers,
colleagues, editors, agents, readers and friends. Thank people for finding and
posting a great blog you enjoyed reading. Share a stunning image of a dahlia
that a reader pinned on Pinterest. If you interact with your contacts, your
following will grow.
Measure
Your Return on Investment (ROI)
Social media platforms are free, but our
time isn’t. In this 24/7 culture that we live in, there never seems to be
sufficient time to check all of our email, read our Facebook friends’ posts,
and finish all the books we hope to write. So we want to be certain that our
time on social media is well spent.
We also want to analyze what works and what
doesn’t. Do more of your friends and fans on Facebook comment when you include
an image with your post? If you’re testing blog post titles, was there a
certain title that your Tweeps retweeted more often? Are you losing followers
on Twitter as fast as you’re gaining them? Do you know why your Facebook page
likes soared by 300 last month?
You need to know the answers to these
questions so that you will know what to post in the future. Discovering the
messages that resonate with your audience is critical to your marketing
efforts. To know what these metrics are, subscribe to an application that will
analyze your performance and help you to learn from the data that it culls. Here
are a few:
All you need to do is type in the web
address to your Facebook author page (not your personal profile) and this free
program will analyze your engagement. Your score will be somewhere between 1
and 100. The higher your score, the better you are doing. It will rate your
growth in likes, rank your score against similar pages, measure your response
time to comments left by fans, determine whether you are asking questions often
enough, and remind you to denote more milestones. Basically, it provides an
at-a-glance look at the areas you excel in and the areas that need improvement.
Everyone with a Facebook tool should take advantage of this free analytics
program.
For $39/month, SproutSocial will analyze
your Facebook and Twitter accounts. The analytics are comprehensive and in
addition to a PDF report, you can download an Excel spreadsheet that examines
your click-through-rates on a day-by-day basis. It provides in-depth
demographics and measures tweets, retweets, follows, mentions, replies and
direct messages. It will also measure how social you are and determine your
influence. You can also use this application to schedule your posts, unfollow
users, and at the premium level, it will determine your best posting times.
For $49/month, this application will
analyze your data every week, build your reports, and send them to you.
Measureful automatically distills your Google Analytics data into weekly
insights and reports. You can connect your accounts in five minutes or less and
wait for the reports to arrive.
Curalate bills itself as the only analytics
program for Instagram and Pinterest. It will analyze social media conversations
and provide insights into your Pinterest and Instagram profiles. Use it to
measure, monitor and grow your influence. In today's increasingly visual world
of applications, Curalate can combine sophisticated image recognition
algorithms with technologies to provide you with an analysis of your images. If
you're a writer and photographer, this is an analytic tool you’ll likely need.
Social media needn’t force you to spend
hours at your computer every day, sucking the hours out of your day when you
have other pressing needs, responsibilities and desires to write. By spending
fifteen minutes every morning curating and scheduling and fifteen minutes every
evening socializing online, you will benefit from the power of social media in
today’s world and find readers who will be happy to find you and read your
books.
About the Author
