Social media marketing that won’t take over your life

What single thing did Fred Campos, the motivational speaker at this month’s meeting of Dallas Mystery Writers, utter that convinced me to try social media marketing? “You don’t have to be 100 percent better – you only have to be a little better. The difference between first place and second place at the Kentucky Derby is a fraction of a second. A year later, the difference is $10 million.”

Well, that and that social media sites are now search engines. Once upon a time, we went to specialized search engines – Yahoo, Bing, Google – to look for information. Now we search for it on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Youtube. 

image: pixabay

If you’re looking for a plumber, do you search Youtube? The answer, surprising though it may be, is often – yes.

“Make a video no matter what you do,” Campos said. “There needs to be a video about every single book you write. . . A smart phone is your recording studio. Add a little humor to it if you can.” (Maybe I could do videos about my short story publications?)

As anybody who has searched Youtube has found, those videos don’t have to be of Oscar-contender quality. But for more inspiration and suggestions for topics, check out the tips I gleaned from teen BookTube book reviewers at the North Texas Teen Book Festival. My favorite: a TV screen tuned to a cartoon channel (because of the bright colors) and paused. Consider changing background as appropriate!

Although I’ve recently completed a book-length thriller manuscript, I feel a little silly thinking about marketing for a book that hasn’t even been agented, much less sold to a publisher. 

Campos had an answer for that, a client who planned to self-publish, but what he described as a “pre-marketing campaign” a year in advance of release, using the time to search for potential readers. In her case, she did that by searching on Twitter for people who followed other media on her topic. (See last Tuesday’s post, title link, about doing this.)

The rest of his suggested pre-marketing campaign (segueing into actual marketing) includes, per quarter, on either Twitter or Facebook:

• 20-30 editorial messages, about characters, books, stories, etc.
• 10-15 pictures (see also my tips on copyright-free images)
• 2-3 press releases
• 1-2 videos

Wait. Press releases? For what press outlets? 

“Everybody can write a press release about anything,” Campos assured his audience. “These are where search engines go to get information. You should have a press release about every book, every book signing.”

For tips on how to write press releases, see my post, "Writers: prepare for our closeups!"

Once a book is available, every release should end with a call to action – buy the book!  

And make social media presence ongoing. The issue, as with the racehorse imagery at the beginning of this post, isn’t to knock ‘em dead once. It’s to run consistently, one race at a time. It can be an hour a day or 10 minutes a day. Consider scheduling your messages and tweets in advance (he uses Hootsuite, which has both free and for-pay versions). Make it about spending some time rather than money. 

All of this barely scratches the surface of what Campos spent more than an hour telling the group at our Dallas Mystery Writers’ meeting, and I could barely take notes and screenshots of his slides fast enough to keep up. For more, I heartily recommend suggesting him as a speaker to your own group or club. 

But oh, you don’t have a group? Then one last public service announcement: writing groups and writers and information will throng WORDfest next Saturday (March 24). It’s free, but the organizers would love to know how many name badges to print, sandwiches to prepare, parking spaces to reserve. Please come, but also please register via Ticketleap by this coming Monday (March 19). See you there!