Social media techniques for newbies

I'm still learning how to best manage my time with my blogging and social media platform building. It can get disheartening when you're spending hours upon hours writing content but your website traffic and blog traffic remain low. Worse still, you haven't touched that manuscript in a very long time and the vision of becoming a serious writer and freelancer is quickly diminishing under the author platform and brand building pile.

Sound familiar?

I think it will always be a juggling act so be prepared for that, but there are little things you can do to start to turn things around if you want to see better results and be encouraged. The following is from my personal experience. I started an experiment three weeks ago with the aim of increasing my website traffic and I'm pleased to report it's going very well.

Using Hootsuite - to give me the option to track those all important shortened URLs and the traffic they might produce - I began by scheduling tweets with a link back to my website content every hour. The tweets are divided into three (three different subject matters) so each one reoccurs every three hours. This is personal preference. I have a thing about threes! I know this is controversial social media practice but I'm about to change it up so bear with me. I reasoned that I could reach all of my target audience across the globe by dividing up like this and tweeting every hour. Also I am looking to get traffic all over my website, not just to my blog. I want people to see the different things I write about and I want people to get to know me.

So one week went by and my website traffic skyrocketed into the hundreds again and I began to gain more Twitter followers. I schedule a week's worth of tweets at a time to keep it manageable. This takes about an hour and a half depending how prepared and focused you are. It's mind numbing work but well worth it. The second week I changed the content and for the third week coming to an end today, I changed the content once more. Going into the fourth week, I will be tweeting some of my favourite recent articles from other writers keeping to my "threes and hourly" schedule. I've picked these blogs to follow and they now sit on my Blogger page. This is another benefit of using Google's Blogger platform. Make the integration work for you. I believe you should be able to do "dot to dot" with your social media so maintaining your author platform becomes seamless.

It helps to have a regular blogging schedule too so you are always producing new and fresh content - and more importantly, you're still writing and not just being a scheduling monkey! This gives you more to tweet about and more to share through your social media. I blog over on my website and I'm currently working on this blog to see where it leads me - whether I can gain a bigger audience for my work, whether the stats can help me and whether Google+ is something I want to venture into.

Going back to my hourly tweeting schedule, I know I can't always be tweeting links to content because social media is supposed to be just that - social. My next step is to build relationships with fellow bloggers in my areas of interest - writing, travel and photography. I also want to have a "product" that I can offer for free over on my website and here on this blog. That "product" will be the basis of Phase Two of this experiment!

One final word - I have my website linked up to Google Analytics. You can only link one website / blog to Google Analytics but, for me, that's ok because Blogger has its own Stats so I can still track this blog's progress through there. Anyhoo, one important thing I've already noticed is that I don't get a very high percentage of returning visitors to my website. I'm hoping by bringing the "social" into my media and offering my "product" I can turn this around.

Social media mistakes

Before we discuss the final aspect of your author platform - blogging - I want to highlight some social media mistakes to avoid to keep you on the straight and narrow...

1) Setting up a Twitter and Facebook profile and then not using it
Aim to visit your profile daily but limit the amount of time to between 30 minutes and 1 hour, at least in the beginning. Then it can be down to personal preference once you've established a routine. Post great content regularly and I guarantee you'll create a buzz, not just for yourself, but for your followers / audience too. If you can't get to a writing group, this is the next best thing - virtual socialising.

2) Only connecting with family and friends
The ultimate goal of social media is to raise your profile as a writer, so you must go beyond your family and friends circle and reach out to your target market. This will drive traffic to your website and book/s and people will see what you have to offer.

3) Constant self promotion
There's a well known rule with social media, the 90/10 rule - share something of value 90% of the time (great content that helps people) and promote yourself for the remaining 10%. Remember, people want to get to know you before they do business with you. You need to establish likeability and trust first.

4) No plan
Social media can become addictive or useless without a plan of action. You have to ask yourself the following: What do I want to get out of this? Who do I want to connect with? How am I going to connect with them? How am I going to establish myself as a credible writer? How will I brand myself? What content am I going to post? How often am I going to post it?
It may seem bizarre, but I have a blogging plan and I actually know what my next 100 blog posts are going to say. I haven't written them yet, but I know what content I'm using. You need to be thinking along the same lines. It really helps if you are trying to get into the habit of writing something every day.

5) Not tracking progress
I'm not purely running my website and blog for financial gain at the moment. I'm still establishing my parameters. However, this needs to be in the back of your mind if you're freelancing and need the income. You want to make things easy for yourself, so link your blog to all of your social media profiles and with one click you can potentially reach hundreds, if not thousands of people - more on this over the coming days when we take an in depth look at blogging. The golden rule is, if you can measure it, you can monetise it. It's good to keep an eye on how many people are visiting your website daily and where they are coming from. If you can see more traffic coming from Twitter for example, then you know to put more content to Twitter to build on this success - but also look to see why Facebook isn't working for you.

GOOD LUCK!