Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Facebook

Two ideas

We’re going to talk about author pages and just posting on Facebook and not necessarily with an author page. But Facebook is the big gorilla, with over 1.3 billion registered accounts. It’s pretty much no longer a mere social network; instead, it’s as catholic as the phone book.

Author Pages

Our link today is to David Baldacci’s professional Facebook page. I think it’s a decent one. The images are good, it seems to be kept up, and it has some great calls to action.

Wait, what’s a call to action?

Click here! Join this! Sign. Share. Buy. 

These are all requests for you, the reader, to do something. You are being asked to somehow act, based upon what you’ve got in front of you. 

Desperate-sounding calls to action (Please, please, please click!) or too many of them, or overly aggressive ones (If you don’t share in five minutes, the terrorists win), are not going to help you. 

Bootsy Collins does a great job with this. He’s not a writer. But when he uploads an image, he writes something about it and then asks his fans to ‘click that Love button’.

What’s David doing here?

David – or, more likely, his marketing team – is sprinkling a few calls to action amidst a lot of other content. He links to interviews, and to personal pictures back stage or elsewhere, in addition to pictures of his books with exhortations to click and purchase. Remember how we talked about the Rule of Thirds in the last installment? David is definitely doing this. There’s one third or so of pure purchasing content; another third is personal. The final third is content about fan interaction and/or teaching his process. 

He’s also got a colorful, beautiful page with fresh content. His page is lively. 

Do you need David’s money and his marketing team? Of course not. 

For you, you’ll need to work on keeping the content fresh. You will need good, clear images, and not just for your covers. You will need a good picture of yourself – or several. You should also grab some evergreen type images. What do I mean by this? These are generic images that you can put into any and every blog post, if you have nothing else. A feather quill in an inkwell. A book with blank pages. A cluttered desk. A sunset. A city skyline. Mountains. Flowers. A typewriter. A moose on roller skates if that floats your boat. But make sure the images have a Creative Commons license. Or make them yourself. 

Once you have 30 followers, you can begin to gather metrics. I won’t get too much into the specifics but Facebook page metrics are pretty useful. Oh, and how do you get 30 followers? Start by asking your friends and family nicely. You know, your strong ties, as I mentioned when we were talking about social strategy? Yeah, those folks. Start with them. And then ask your weak ties, too.

But I don’t Have an Author Page!

Not to worry! They are nice but they are not strictly necessary. 

And an author page really won’t work for you if you don’t have a lot of content to share. Because if you abandon it, or you don’t update often enough so it looks like you have, it’ll be worse. 

Why doesn’t the puppy have a Facebook author page? Because I’m being published, and don’t wish to interfere with marketing plans for my book. Will I create one in the future? Maybe. 

But in the meantime, you can always just post links on your own wall. 

So – what do you need to just start posting your stuff on Facebook? Here are a few tips. 

1.       Wattpad provides social sharing buttons for every work. They are useful but they are imperfect. You should tweak the verbiage that goes with them. You have some space to write on Facebook. So use it.

2.        Make sure you always, always, always post with an image. Why? Because Facebook posts with images are clicked some 53% more often than those without. Consider your news feed and your wall. These are walls of text. When a picture interrupts them, it catches your eye.

3.       Always look at the preview, and make sure the image is showing up. If for some reason it isn’t, just add an image – just upload one – with the post.

4.       Gather up some reusable images. These should be good old Creative Commons free use types of images. Make them of generic writer-related stuff, like a book or books, a bookshelf, a feather quill, an old-fashioned typewriter, an old PC, things like that. If you can take your own pictures, or you can draw, that’s even better. These are for when you’re really, really stumped as to which image to use. Just grab a generic and be on your merry way.

5.       Post about once/day or so. You can take weekends off (usually).

6.       If you’ve got a page, then get 30 followers for your page. I don’t care how you do it, and neither does Facebook. The 30 is so that you can get metrics. After you hit the magical 30, slow down on the link flogging. Instead, switch to a more one-on-one strategy. People will, for the most part, like a page if you ask them nicely to.

7.       Once you get a few weeks of metrics, pay attention to them, and start drawing conclusions. Are your followers all on Facebook on Mondays at 3 PM? Then make sure you schedule your Monday posts (you can do that with either HootSuite or Facebook itself) for around or just before 3 PM.

Hoot Suite

This is a good time to get a little practice in with Hoot Suite. I guarantee you will make a few errors to start. But try it. Just, get your feet wet, okay? 

The link is to David’s Facebook page; the YouTube video is an interview with him where he discusses his process. The image should be self-explanatory. ;) 

Did this chapter help you? Did it hold your interest? Do you want to see more? Then please vote! You know the puppy wants you to. ;) By the way, I don’t have an author page on Facebook, not yet. But I hang out at some author pages. Share your favorites in the comments section. Oh, and this section is dedicated to @alexkarola for reminding me to write it! So, thanks!