Published 2015 by Advanced Social/Media Services. This work is copyright © Advanced Social Media Services Ltd. Social Media is Dynamite For Writers – Stand back. This could expand your book sales! All rights reserved These materials contain valuable content and must not be duplicated, excerpted or distributed without written permission. No portion of these materials may be shared or reproduced in any manner under any circumstance whatsoever without advance written permission and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. For permissions requests, contact: @LPOBryan Dublin, Ireland, or [email protected] Legal Disclaimer – Must be Read No portion of this material is intended to offer professional legal, personal or financial advice. The information contained herein cannot replace or substitute for the services of trained professionals in any field, including, but not limited to, financial, managerial or legal matters. 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Cover image © kromkrathog - Fotolia.com Other images courtesy © spiral media & © Thomas Bethge & Fotolia.com All logos and other images are copyright of their owners. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Guide to the Guide .......................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1 - Understanding the explosive elements ......................................... 5 Chapter 2 – Developing a social media plan .................................................. 36 Chapter 3 – Your engagement strategy ......................................................... 51 Chapter 4 – Can you use social media to increase reader loyalty? ................. 59 Chapter 5 – Measuring & Monitoring ............................................................ 66 Chapter 6 – The Power of Social Media to do good ....................................... 70 Chapter 7 – How social media helped me. ..................................................... 88 Chapter 8 – Arguments, mistakes and myths about social media .................. 93 Chapter 9 – Supercharging your social media with 12 Storytelling Techniques ................................................................................................................... 103 Chapter 10 – Some social media puzzles explained ..................................... 122 Summary .................................................................................................... 133 Appendix 1 – Social Media Tools (some free) .............................................. 134 Appendix 3 –12 Blog Posts from my Blog:SocialMedia4Writers.com ........... 138 About the Author ........................................................................................ 157 3 GUIDE TO THE GUIDE At the end of each chapter there is a summary of key points to allow you to get real benefits from each section. I encourage you to take notes as you read. Please skip around to the sections that most interest you. 4 CHAPTER 1 - UNDERSTANDING THE EXPLOSIVE ELEMENTS 1.1 OVERVIEW The term social media covers a wide and growing number of online services. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, microblogs, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Soundcloud, YouTube, MySpace and over a hundred other sites offer the facilities to interact socially with readers and other writers through the internet. I won’t quote growth rates at you or tell you this is the final list of social media sites, as the facts are changing as fast as we can measure them. Facebook has over a billion users and Twitter about half that. That’s a lot of people. A lot of potential readers. This book is about the explosive impact this global phenomenon is having, and will have, for authors, and how you can use that to your advantage. This is a global phenomenon. Social media is exploding all over the world. In India and Brazil for instance, it is 5 powered by smart phones, café’s at street corners and low cost laptops. If you can find a country that social media will not affect please let me know. Even in Afghanistan it’s having an impact. They have set up a female only Internet café in Kabul. Social media is what they will be spending their time doing in that teashop. Social media allows those Kabul users to see pictures of their relative’s babies, kitchens and homes, to talk to their sisters and to enjoy a little freedom. That is one of the critical elements of social media. The freedom it gives to individuals. More people can write and have their content read widely than at any moment in history. Everything in the publishing industry is changing, as the channels to readers through social media impact on all of us. People have staged revolutions over the innate human desire for free speech. Sure, having enough food is important, but that’s not all people rise up over, just ask the people in Libya why they overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and his family in 2011. They weren’t starving. For many people it was simply about freedom. 6 The second critical element, for me, is the deep cultural change that is taking place because of social media. Industries are being created (social media support companies, app developers), evolving (TV, newspapers, publishing), and dying (record stores, CD hardware stores and video shops) because of how social media and the internet is changing the world. And that is only the starting point for social media’s cultural impact. Where once the urge to hide and be secretive dominated, the need to do well on social media forces writers to open up and be transparent. This is a sea change for writers. Although some are against this new era, openness and transparency are inherently good things, so I expect that this geni is out of the bottle for good. In the past authors were expected to be unapproachable, distant creatures. Now most have blog sites at the very least, and a 7 growing percentage have Twitter personalities and Facebook pages too. The next generation of writers, of which I am one, is likely to be even more connected with social media, as the need to do well in this area becomes a prerequisite for “success” as a writer not only in fiction, but also in non-fiction too, whether that “success” is through traditional publishing or through self publishing. The same thing is happening in almost all other areas of employment and society. You just can’t escape it. We have literally never seen anything like it. It’s the impact of the internet squared, and the impact of personal computers multiplied by eight. And we are still at the beginning. Social media is not only the fastest growing IT phenomenon, it is also what the most lively business meetings are about these days. The old guard resists, as always, as they did with PCs twenty five years ago, and the internet fifteen years ago, and the young go- getters strive to prove that what they know instinctively about social media is true. But no amount of analysis is ever enough to convince the Luddites. If we listened to them we’d all still be riding horses and travelling by sail. 8 Here’s the reality. Social media will have a big impact on writers. The requirement to market ourselves transforms the way writers think. Few writers would have thought that a selfie was important, until now. The people and organisations who learn how to use the power of social media will benefit, and the people who want to stay shackled to horse drawn technology will slowly fade away, and then die. The aim of this book is to help you to benefit from this social media revolution. Here is a suggestion on how to deal with those who oppose social media; use social media, but don’t rub that fact into the faces of the Luddites, the people who hate anything new. Your success through social media will speak more than a thousand words about their reluctance to come with you. 9 1.2 UNDERSTANDING YOUR MATERIALS – THE BASICS If you don’t have accounts with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (for business & professional books’ authors mainly, though LinkedIn has some great author groups), YouTube (for visual, media & entertainment oriented books mainly), SoundCloud (for recording of you reading your work) and Goodreads (for your book lists and connecting with readers through groups) and Pinterest (for people who like collecting images or whose books have a visual aspoect) and Flickr (for dedicated photo & image people), get some accounts now. You can start with just the big ones if you like. Set up a Facebook page, a Twitter identity and your choice of one of the others depending on what you write. Deciding on your identity for each will be an important step. If you’re working for someone else you’ll have to keep in mind the impact of what you do on your job. Simply put, say the wrong thing and you could get fired. If you want to know what the wrong thing is understand this: if you’re negative, give away 10 personal or company information or break the contracts or agreements you are bound by expect trouble sooner rather than later. If you’re your own boss you still have to think about limits. Only now your boss is your bank, your landlord, your friends, your readers and your spouse, not always in that order. So keep in mind the likely impact of what you are doing when you decide to publish that blog post at three in the morning telling us all about what you got up to last night or why you despise a fellow author. 11 Here are some of the things I’ve learned about each of the main social media sites: TWITTER 1. Twitter is a voracious micro-blogging site with a limit of 140 characters per post. It’s a some to many news and comment feed. About 10% of Twitter’s users produce 90% of Twitter’s content. Be among the 10% and you will get noticed.