Social Media Marketing

After a long time away from social media I’ve started to tweet and Facebook again. Since I last used social media as a marketing tool things have moved on and I discovered that images on twitter are ‘the’ thing, National and international celebration days allow you to plan ahead and use hashtag terms you know will be trending. So last month I researched dates I could use to market my short story collections (Anansi – Brer Rabbit and Coyote). During my research I found Awareness Days and Days of the Year which contain a list of international and national days.

I then needed to know what the ideal size for Twitter and Facebook images was. So I researched into this and during my research I came across this blog post, which breaks down the page layouts and sizes for Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Youtube. Using this I created a template for Twitter images (1024 pix x 512 pix – although you can use other sizes) and a template for Facebook images (398 pix x 296 pix – again you can use alternate sizes) using Photoshop. However if you don’t have access to this or a similar software you can use Canva, which enables you to create images with text for social media use.

My next step was to create short links for my books and relevant websites. For this I used Bitly, which has greatly improved since I used it last. You can now track how many times a link has been followed, which is very useful.
Having the information I started to create images to compliment my tweets and Facebook updates. Last month I chose:

At the moment I’m working on images and ideas for:

National Gardening Week (11th – 17th April)
International Mother Earth Day (22nd April)
World Book Night (23rd April)
National Share a Story Month (1st – 31st May)

This research and tweeting appears be paying off because my sales of physical books for March was the highest it’s been for ten months. So I plan to continue with this process. I realise that over the next few months I’ll have to put in quite a bit of work but it will mean I’ll be ready for these events when they come around again next year.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful and if you have any insights please do share.

Couldn’t resist sharing – loved this quote as it gave me an excuse to use a photo of my best four-legged friend (Tasha)