How to be Savvy and Compete in the Social Media Market

For better or worse, social media rules the world in 2019. If you aren’t tapping into the social media population, you’re missing out on a huge portion of potential consumers. This is a guide with some tips on how to get your foot in the door and bust it open.

If you’re currently operating solely on one platform, I’d advise that you expand your online presence — in addition to any platform that your business is on now — to Twitter and Instagram, which are arguably the two most prominent social platforms when it comes to promotion. Those are the two sites that we’ll focus mostly on, but we’ll touch on Facebook and LinkedIn, too. 

How to be Savvy and Compete in the Social Media Market

Promoting tweets and posts is a surefire way to get engagement, although it comes with a cost. Your ads appear as ordinary tweets and posts, so they blend in with users’ feeds. On Twitter, you’re only charged based on engagement, so if someone scrolls right through, you don’t have to worry about money being wasted. Engagement is defined as when a user retweets, likes, or replies to your tweet. 

Costs vary, but tend to hover around $1.30 per engagement. Instagram does things a little differently. It tallies views rather than engagement, and charges roughly $6.70 per a thousand views. Facebook offers paid promotion, too, and for comparison, Facebook charges $7.19 per a thousand impressions. Regardless, if there is room in the budget, money spent on guaranteed engagement is money well-spent.

Hosting contests is generally a risk-free way of promoting engagement, too. It can be anything as simple as a tweet/post along the lines of a “retweet/share for a chance to win this” type deal. Relatively new to Twitter and Instagram are poll features, where you can survey your followers and get their input on anything you desire. Poll questions can be done just for kicks, or to gather legitimate feedback and information from your audience.

Thinking Outside the Social Media Market Box

Targeting your competitors’ following is a powerful play. This is a method that doesn’t seem to occur to everyone. On almost every major social platform, it only takes a click or two to see a list of all the profiles that a particular account is following or followed by. 

This can be incredibly valuable information, and can make it very easy to find your target market. After all, platforms like Twitter make it very easy to find consumers who are unhappy campers with a particular service — you merely have to find the tweets that say so. Apps like Hootsuite make it easy to create and organize multiple feeds, and can be a great tool in building a strong social media presence.

When it comes to Facebook, it’s important to post regularly, but not robotically. Tirelessly recycling the same information or even the same posts (which usually happens with people who have automated/scheduled posts set-up through a third-party app or system) does not drive traffic to your page — if anything, it drives users away. Don’t be afraid to show personality. 

Again, you don’t want to be a robot. Social media is social for a reason. You can stay professional while also having fun with it.

Getting Personal

Taking your followers behind the scenes is a great way to gain and maintain interest. This is not specific to just Facebook. If you show content on your social platforms that is exclusive and not seen anywhere else, of course users are more likely to regularly visit your page.

Interacting with and responding to what your followers have to say should be a priority — it’s the closest thing to customer service that social media has to offer. Odds are, you run a relatively small account, and it shouldn't take more than fifteen or twenty minutes each day to go through your “inbox” and answer tweets, posts and responses directed at you. It can mean a lot to a costumer, but perhaps more importantly, you avoid potentially rubbing someone the wrong way by not acknowledging their effort to reach out.

LinkedIn as a Social Media Market

I want to wrap up by offering a few notes on LinkedIn. If you’re looking for a candidate, you want options. The quickest way to limit the number of candidates you’ll hear from is by scaring applicants away in the “Job Description” section. Sure, make known the type of mold that you’re looking for in a candidate, but there’s no need to create an intimidating feel. 

Create a welcoming environment. You want to promote applications. By avoiding intimidation, more applications will filter through. Odds are that, as a result, a few of those candidates will not be what you’re looking for. That’s okay. LinkedIn is a great platform to get familiar with a potential candidate’s résumé. It’s not a platform designed to get to know a candidate on a personal level.

Like most other social networks, if you pay up on LinkedIn, you’ll reap the rewards. LinkedIn can hook you up with guaranteed connections and even place your postings in more prominent positions on the site if there’s room within your budget to exercise those options. 

LinkedIn is known as the place where professionals meet. Build your network of people within your industry, share information, and learn from their expertise as they will learn from yours. Their network will see your blog, newsletter or update once shared and you will have increased your reach exponentially. 

For help reaching your target audience through social media, web presence, and publicity, contact us and together we will design a path to your success. Visit us at spotlightpublicityonline.com

The Hard Truth About Self Publishing

With your novel completed, it’s reasonable to presume the hard work is just getting started. Many of us hope to find an agent, then a publishing house that will send you a nice, big, fat advance on your magnum opus. To be honest, the traditional route is becoming harder and harder to follow these days, as publishing houses work on a much smaller margin and some aren’t interested in taking a gamble on an unknown author's works.

This leaves few options to the novice author, and though the satisfaction of completing a manuscript is wonderful, publishing and seeing it on bookstore shelves is even more rewarding.

To crack this market, Amazon has developed a platform where with a little know-how, independent authors can publish their own works, for free, on a print on demand model. Sure, the books are in print and people can buy them, but what is the real upside for the author?

In order to sell your self-published books, you need to market yourself. One way to go about this is to buy pay-per-click advertising on Amazon (along with an infinite amount of other authors) so that someone searching for something close to your manuscript will see your advertisement and then buy it.

Also, you can invest your effort in attending book fairs. That comes with a cost, but it does put you face-to-face with your potential readers. This is a good option for self-published authors. 

Another option is to send out Advance Reader Copies with a professionally designed media kit to independent bookstores with the focus on getting them to request to put your book in stock. The issue is that you are now buying books from Amazon to send on consignment. Some bookstores will request that you pay the postage to have them send it back to you.

To be successful, you may consider an advertising budget for Facebook and Amazon ads. The serious ad campaigns that do work are costly, but they do reach a targeted audience. 

The struggles for a self-published author are real. It takes a great deal of energy to gain momentum, but that's not all. Chances are that many bookstores aren’t going to want to place a Createspace book on their shelves. Why? Your Createspace book has an issue- it’s non-refundable and it’s print on demand. 

Bookstores are businesses with a slim profit margin. This means that shelf space is limited and they simply won't use space to put up your book in the hopes that it will sell. That represents a loss of real estate. A loss they can’t afford when larger book stores only stock big name publishing houses. 

We recently received this well-worded letter from a local bookstore where one of our clients wanted placement. The client used Createspace to publish their book. 

Hello, 
Thanks for your inquiry. We do offer a consignment program for authors who live within our immediate market, or whose books are set in or about the area. Based on list price, we take a % discount and pay out the remainder to the author on a quarterly basis for copies sold. 
We have two requirements for accepting books on consignment, in addition to the local connection: First, all consignment books must be professionally printed, with title and author on the spine. Second, we do not accept consignment books which indicate Amazon or Createspace as the printer or publisher. 
If neither of these is an issue, and the payment terms work for your author, we will be glad to move forward with setting up a consignment agreement. 

Sincerely, 

Book Store Manager

So, what can you do? Give up? Spend countless hours fretting about how hard it is to become a writer?

No. What you can do is look for alternatives, such as independent presses like Purple Finch Press or discover a match on the incredibly helpful online writer's resource, the Writer's Market. 

 

These types of print houses are unique in that your book, which you still fund and control, has a worthy and selective professional publishing contract. You own the books, you maintain marketing and sales rights just as with Createspace, but you get so much more. Your marketing and publishing costs are funneled into the publishing of your book just the same, but in this instance, toward a fully-realized marketing team with a legitimate publishing company with interest in your book succeeding. Your book is released into the world with a print impress that has credibility and marketing in place. 

This method of publishing is something relatively new. In order to complete with larger houses, the independent publishers maintain a lowered overhead with print costs being covered by the author with the stamp of a professional print press. You gain legitimacy, enough to get your book honestly considered to be placed on any bookshelf in the country.

You gain invaluable assistance from professionals who know how to market your manuscript, who know how to take your pride and joy and get it sold.

Your investment in such a print house project may seem a constraint on your budget, but if the goal is to be an author with a publishing house backing your novel, then this is one way to go.  You have a work of art that was selectively chosen by the print house to represent their brand. You have published a novel on your own terms, and you have opened a world of possibility for sales.