CQ Social Media Guides CQ has put together a series of guides for each major social media platform. This is the introductory guide that will give you some best practices for how to find and connect with your audience, and manage your social media platforms and campaigns. Each guide will tell you:

● Who is on a platform in terms of demographic profiles. This will help you determine if you’re putting your resources into the right place.

● What you can do on that platform ● Tools you can use with that platform ● When you should post content to that platform

Some of you are very savvy with social media. We want this guide, and the others in this series, to be useful for you, too. Overall, we’re sharing some best practices and tips that should be useful regardless of your existing social media engagement level.

Don’t Forget Your Email List Don’t forget about your owned platforms. For instance, your email list gives you a one-to-one connection to people, and gives you control. If all of these social platforms went out of business or made it hard for you to use it, you would still have your list. So remember to use social to bring people to your list.

Who is my ideal reader?

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1) Who is your core audience? 2) Where do they spend time online?

The wrong answer to #1 is “All kinds of people.” The wrong answer to #2 is “My audience is all over the place.” Knowing your audience is your foundation, your starting point, and the most important thing you can do when it comes to social media. You should know whom you’re trying to reach, because you want to give them relevant content, and use the media that’s best for that audience in a way that suits that platform.

Look at your most dedicated fans. The one who leave you great reviews, love your style, and recommend you to people they know. You might want to create a kind of composite (not in a Cronenberg way) for your ideal reader. Or loosely base your ideal reader on a few of your fans. Is it a Millennial named Simon who’s finishing his graduate degree in public policy, loves DIY videos on YouTube, and dives into a different obsession every month (last month it was intelligent fabrics; now it’s Chabad houses)? Is it a Gen X stepmom lawyer named Jessica who DJs classic hip-hop every couple of weeks, loves Pinterest and Twitter, can make you any kind of artisan bread you could think of, has a ton of unusual and underused skills, and an amazing record collection? You don’t have to do it that way, of course, but it can help you. Focus on giving the right content to the right audience, and please be extremely wary of anything that promises you a lot of new followers on any platform. The same goes for your email list. Where does my audience like to hang out on social media?

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Look at your most active followers, and read over the demographic info in our series of guides to get a better idea of which platforms you should focus on. If you use Google

Analytics on your site, you can see where your social traffic is coming from (and if you need to do a better job of bringing people to your site). You could also do a poll or survey on your newsletter, and ask your subscribers what other social platforms they like to use. A small number of responses is normal, but the data can still be extremely useful, and may surprise you. Don’t try to reach everyone and anyone. Talk to that ideal reader. If they wouldn’t like something, then you don’t do it; simple as that. It makes decision-making so much easier.

Look at Other Authors If you want to get a better handle on who your audience is, you can also look at fans of authors who are similar to you. Check out what social media platforms the author uses consistently, and who follows them on social media. Followerwonk is a good tool for seeing any commonalities there. Study what a few other, similar authors are doing on social. Are they on the social platforms you like? What are they doing right, and where are they falling short? Can you fill in what’s missing? Keep in mind that just because another author is on a particular platform and doing well there does not mean that you should necessarily be there, too. You should be on the platforms that make sense for you, your strengths, your brand, and your audience. Think strategically, not tactically.

Which platforms are going to get my focus? It’s better to be present and consistent on 2-3 platforms than to do a quarter-assed job on a lot of platforms. And you should only be on platforms that you actually enjoy (or at least dislike less than others). Pick one main focal platform based on your strengths. If you love video, maybe it’s YouTube. If you love creating and curating visuals, maybe it’s Pinterest. If you love talking, try a podcast. Keep in mind that you can make a lot of videos that don’t require you to be in them, and you can make videos to put on every social platform.

Then use two or three other platforms that orbit around the main one. So, if you’re doing video in person, you’ll probably want to be on both Facebook and YouTube.

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What am I supposed to do for social content? What do people want to know about you and your work? What would they find interesting, funny, or informative? Keep your content aligned with that, and don’t post content that wouldn’t appeal to them. Have conversations with your audience, and make them active participants in co-creation with you. This can include contests, polls, asking them questions, and asking for their opinion on as much as you can.

Make Micro-Content The other thing to do is make micro-content from one big piece of content. Think of your book as the one big piece of content. (Blog posts can also be a big piece of content.) From that, you’re going to create different kinds of video, images, multi-image collages, quote cards, character cards, blog posts, and more. Then you distribute that content in a way that’s tailored to the social platform.

How to manage your time on social media As an author, you need to market and promote your books and your brand, and this requires some discipline. After all, you’re making images sized optimally for each platform, and curating content your audience would like. You’re making videos, GIFs, multi-image collages. You’re looking at your social analytics to track engagement, your most successful social posts, and your followers. You’re scheduling and automating. And then there are book launches. ::::scream::::

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I mean, what are we, time lords? You’re only one person, you have a ton of other stuff to do, and you have limited resources. You do not have a working Tardis. But it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You can batch, schedule, automate, and streamline your process and be more productive and efficient overall. Yay! Ƹ

Making a Social Media Calendar

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Make a schedule A focused hour or so each week can save you time, cut down on multi-tasking and interruptions, and make you feel less overwhelmed.

Batch Content Give yourself short and longer time blocks for batching content, including visuals, and checking into your platforms. When you batch content, you create a week’s worth of Tweets, or a few Instagram Stories, or 10 Facebook posts for a week. You can also create your images for each platform for at least a week ahead—and we recommend that you use an image with every post, if possible, and that you increase your visual content overall. For example, maybe Saturdays are when you batch some graphics for at least the week ahead. Maybe you batch Tweets and other posts on Mondays, and make some Instagram Stories ahead of time on Fridays.

And you can repurpose that content. You don’t just use it once. On Twitter, especially, it’s crucial to repeat yourself! You may want to tweak the headline and other details—this also gives you a way to test what works better for your audience.

Timing Your Content

In your calendar, decide when you’ll update, what you’ll post there, and how much time you’ll spend there. For example, you might check in to Pinterest once a week, on Fridays. You might schedule one post a day for Instagram, and up to three posts a day for Facebook. Our guides will give the optimal times for posting on each platform, and give you suggestions for how often to post.

Book Launch Make a separate project for the social media tasks you do around a book launch.

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During a book launch, you’re typically running social media campaigns, which are separate from your normal social media process and run for a limited period of time.

You would probably divide your launch into phases of one or two weeks:

○ What you’ll do on your social platforms a few weeks in advance, e.g. updating banners and other graphics announcing the release date of your book, etc.

○ What content you’ll post to social the week of your launch (e.g. video, visuals, contests), where you’ll post it, and when.

○ What you’ll do on social the week after your launch, e.g. updating the same banners and profiles to let people know the book has been released, etc.

Tools to Help Get Social Media Scheduling Under Control

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The following tools are good options for organizing and/or scheduling and automating your social media. Most of them have a free version, but I wanted to also mention a couple that are paid-only. You can check them all out and see if there’s one that suits your needs. Or you can stick with your Saved By the Bell paper calendar.

Organizing / Project Management Trello: Trello is a Kanban-style project management web app that helps you manage your content in projects, and manage a book launch. It’s not a social media scheduling or

automation tool. It has boards, lists, and cards. You can either use a visual board with cards (that looks like a game of Solitaire), or a list. They have a free version. Asana: This is another Kanban-style project management web app for work tracking and project management. You can use a visual board or a list with each project, a calendar, progress on each task, reminders, and more. I use the free version, and like Asana the most of the project management tools. It includes more options and I prefer their design and UX. Todoist: Manage tasks and projects with to-do lists, sub-tasks and sub-projects, and a calendar. It also offers progress tracking. They offer a free version. Google Drive: You can create a simple spreadsheet to manage your social media, if you’re more comfortable with that format. Or, you can use Google Calendar to plan out your posts.

Scheduling Hootsuite: The free version lets you manage up to 3 social media profiles in one place and schedule content. The next plan is paid at $19/month, and includes 10 profiles and some campaign features. You can also use it just for monitoring columns: mentions, DMs, keyword searches, lists.

Scheduling and Automation Buffer: A social media scheduling tool that lets you quickly and easily schedule posts for all of your social accounts. Buffer publishes your posts automatically according to the posting schedule you put in place. You can connect one type of social account per network on their free individual plan. The next (paid) tier is $10/month and includes 100 scheduled posts per social account, as well as the ability to connect more social accounts. For the free Buffer plan, in other words, you’re limited to one handle, but you can connect Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+, and Instagram (not Pinterest) under that handle, and store 10 scheduled posts in your account at any given time. It also includes link shortening and tracking, a video and GIF uploader, and the Pablo image creator. You can post the same message to all accounts or add context by customizing each.

CoSchedule: A marketing and social media calendar that’s paid, billed annually at $30/month (with a free trial). For that, you get up to 25 social profiles, a calendar, custom task and promotion templates, best time scheduling, social message analytics, and more. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind paying for it! Edgar: This is a paid app, and it’s not cheap, but check it out if you can swing the pricing and you’re pretty serious about automating your social content. It’s a social media automation app that stores all of your updates online in a category-based library. It features an auto-refilling queue based on your saved content, so it never runs dry.

Tools That Can Help You With Content and Headlines Alltop This site can help you curate content that’s relevant to your audience. Alltop displays stories from sources that you’re already visiting, and helps you discover sources that you didn’t know existed. They group collections into individual pages and display the five most recent headlines, as well as their first paragraphs. Answer the Public This content research tool gives you an aggregated view of questions that people are searching for on search engines, displayed in a wheel. For example, I can enter “books” in the field box, and change the country to US. Results include: Why books are awesome How books influence our lives Are books better than television Books without dialogue Books for 5th graders Books near radiator (uh-oh) Books to read (yours, obviously) Books versus tv (the age-old question) Books without chapters (no thank you!) BloomBerry

BloomBerry is designed to help people understand the questions people are asking on any topic. From the BuzzSumo folks. BuzzSumo Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. See a site's most popular content, find influencers on a particular topic, and sort by most popular infographics and interviews. Discover which type of topics people love to share (and which influencers tend to share and retweet). Google Trends You can compare two terms to see which one is more popular, and which one has dropped off. Look at Trending Searches, and Trending On YouTube by location and time period. The "related searches" section shows both top queries and rising queries, so you can understand exactly what people searched for within that topic. You can also look at Top Charts, which you should definitely be using creatively to combine things, and as a writing prompt. And don’t worry—Backstreet Boys are holding steady at #2 for teen pop stars. What I’m telling you is that they’re back, all right?

What We Learned

● Look at your social analytics to find out when people are engaging with your content, and what content they seem to like the best.

● Experiment and test your social content and timing. You can refer to each of the CQ

social media platform guides for optimal times. Repeat what works well.

● Work on more visual content.

● Make sure your images are tailored for a given platform.

● Focus your efforts and don’t spread yourself too thin. Use platforms that you enjoy and where your audience is most likely to be.

● You want to stay front-in-mind for readers, and keep reminding them that you’re

there. This requires consistency on your chosen platforms.

● Determine your strengths, figure out where you’re willing and likely to put your time and effort, then be consistent and put out content that your audience will find valuable.

● Stay organized :)

Thanks for reading! Your CQ family