Keeping up with your social media marketing platform

Out of the hundreds of ways an author can market their books, some of the most effective come from social media. A strong social media platform can mean sales through positive interaction with fans and getting discovered by other readers. The downside, it can eat valuable time out of the author’s writing schedule.

There are ways, to flip that and make social media do the hard work for us. So authors can get back to creating and less time selling.

Link it up.

Yes, it can be that simple to grab a chunk of time and head back to our favorite characters. Link your accounts with networking clients or managers. Here are a few of the best.

NetworkedBlogs: This client allows an author to syndicate their blog posts. Meaning this client program will send the link of your latest blog to Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedn without you having to lift a finger. Much better than copy pasting and running around the web slapping links on pages. NetworkedBlogs is a free to use program, but they do have a premium membership for more bells and whistles.

Hootsuite: This little gem of a site will allow you to link up nearly your entire profile. Including G+ and Pintrest. You can schedule posts to your platform, read and reply all from this one place, saving a ton of time going from individual site to site. 

Buffer: is also a social media client that will allow you to schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedn, app.net and G+. Buffer only sends though, you can’t read any of your tweets or other media on this one.

Feed140: With this site you can schedule tweets on a 24/7 loop to feed to your twitter accounts. Just be careful not to have them post one after another within minutes. Flooding the Twitter stream is a good way to get unfollowed. Intervals of two or three different tweets an hour gets what you need out there without the deluge.

Triberr: Triberr isn’t really a client or manager, but it is a huge tool for getting your blog posts out there. You join a tribe and share each other’s blog posts to your chosen social media. Depending on how many tribes and how well your tribes share you can reach possibly millions of potential readers with a single post. Yes, really it is that powerful. My personal  experience saw 100 new blog followers and 500 new Twitter followers within the first month of joining and being active. It takes about 5 minutes a day to share posts and is absolutely worth every one.

All of these sites/programs are free to use. They do offer premium memberships for a fee with a few more bells and whistles to add to your marketing wizardry. 

Okay, now you know one secret to getting more writing time and less marketing time. Remember though, this only works if you can stay away from Candy Crush or Castleville while you’re surfing through your social media. *wink*