Previously
I had talked about putting white space back in your life. What writer doesn’t
need just a few more hours every day to get everything done that they need to
do to promote their platform, write their next book and not neglect the family?
It is possible to get all of the important things done in
your 24 hours a day and by employing a few simple techniques you are able to organize
and schedule many of your deadlines and requirements into time frames you can
meet without resorting to procrastination and late night computer snuggles.
But what about social media? How do you harness that beast
to work for you and not suck all of your precious writing time?
SPEND A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME PER DAY ON SOCIAL MEDIA. Once
that time is up, turn it off. Be it 15 minutes or 30 minutes, make sure you
maximize the time that you have and when you’re done, you’re done. Period. Be
jealous of that writing time and don’t let social media suck it away.
DON’T JOIN EVERY MEDIA. Get good at one or two medias and
spend your time studying up and building your audience on those sites. Once you’ve
got those medias down or at least confident on them, add in a third and so on.
This will keep your efforts concentrated without splintering your time and
diluting your work. Also: consider time
you spend researching a social media part of this allotted time. You’ll be
using this research to grow your platform, so don’t consider it wasted time.
USE A SCHEDULING APP. Schedule your social media updates
through either a site like Buffer, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or on Facebook, its own
scheduling program for fan pages. If you take an hour or so every week to
upload and schedule great content, leaving room for spontaneity, you get to
just visit later and interact with your readers, friends and fans. And each of
these platforms has an app for your smart phone as well.
On Twitter, find a handful or so blogs that you like to
follow or have worthy content and schedule tweets for their posts. You can do
this easily using Buffer or Hootsuite. Be sure to tag these people as it not only
grows your audience with great content, but also promotes them which they in
turn see.
For less than 10 minutes a day you can load your queue to keep great
content rolling out all day long.
The big thing with social media is not to get sucked into
it. Consider your research and actual social time on social media all part of
your allotted time and work hard not to go over that. Platform building takes
time and doesn’t just happen overnight, so limiting your time won’t hinder you—in
fact it will do quite the opposite as you work to write a really great book
which will someday help you continue to grow and build that platform.
So put some white space back into your life with these
simple and easy to follow tips with your social media time. Give it a try and
let me know how it goes in the comments!
CLICK TO TWEET:
************************************************
Casey Herringshaw is a homeschool graduate and has been writing since high school. She lives in colorful Colorado where she gets to live her dream stalking--er--visiting with her favorite CO authors.
Casey Herringshaw is a homeschool graduate and has been writing since high school. She lives in colorful Colorado where she gets to live her dream stalking--er--visiting with her favorite CO authors.
Great post. I love the idea of social media time being grafted into your regular schedule. It helps stifle the tendency to fritter away hours doing something that is mostly unproductive in terms of a writing career. I also like the professional approach you suggest. If a writer wants to be taken seriously, he or she has to treat writing not as a hobby but as a profession.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Casey!
ReplyDelete