The Broken Quill: Marketing True Magics 3: Social Media or What Fresh Hell is This?

Ah, social media. We love you. We hate you. Especially Facebook. We all love hating Facebook. But social media is here to stay and needs to be integrated into any marketing campaign. This leads to some issues...

So, So Many Choices…

Social media is a massive opportunity and an equally massive pain in the location of your choice, in part because what's most effective keeps changing!

First there was MySpace. Best thing ever. Then it sucked. Now it’s all about promoting bands and music, so it has found its niche but it’s useless for book promoting purposes.

Then there was Facebook. Best thing ever. Then it changed its algorithm to maximize its ad revenue so only 4% of your fan base see your posts unless you pay money. So they suck.

Now there is Twitter where you can actually reach your followers if you happen to tweet at the right time to maximize the number of followers who see it read it, or enough times that everyone sees it, but not so often that it annoys people and makes them stop following you.

Instagram is coming up, because the only thing better than a short message is a short message with a picture. Usually of your food. Or your self. Or your cat, because cats.

And don’t forget Pinterest, where you can amalgamate stories and website and things that interest you and hope others follow your pins and find you fascinating enough to buy your books.

Did We Mention Blogging?

Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website, make people see you as an authority or at least interesting and you can hook it up to your Twitter and Facebook feeds to further drive traffic to your website and engage people so they will make a purchase.

Not that that’s why I’m doing all these posts and have you bought my books, Small Magics and Cold Magics yet?

And Then There Are All These:

Click here to see the full-size graphic at: http://forwallpapers.com/

Got a headache yet?

And Don’t Forget: Content is King…

You have to have something to say, if you want people to listen.

No one likes the guy screaming BUY MY BOOK! NO REALLY, BUY MY BOOK! I HAVEN’T GIVEN YOU A REASON TO THINK I’M INTERESTING, BUT BUY MY BOOK!

So you need to sit down and develop exciting, engaging content that will help change readers to fan and fans to customers. In all that spare time you have between working and writing and managing all your social media platforms. Oh, and your family. You should probably feed them once in a while. especially the kids.

So What Do I Do?!?!?

How do I maximize my presence on social media in a way that will enable me to reach the individuals that might be interested in buying my book and convert them from prospects into customers while at the same time not taking away my entire life and leaving me no time to write more books which are the product I am selling?

Next week: Cutting Through the Clutter or Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two.