Power = Social Media

I freely admit to all who ask that I am no  techie-savant. I don’t have the gene instilled in my DNA like the kids these days do; I find most factors related to computer knowledge NOT to be intuitive to me; and the term “User Friendly” has no baring on my capabilities. So when I entered this wonderful world of  published author-dom I had to learn how to be effective on social media in order to self-promote myself and my book.

It has been a loooooooooooog journey.

Initially when my website went live I – in my naivete –  thought, “If you build it, they will come.” Yeah, no. You not only have to possess the site, you must introduce it to the masses and keep doing so in order for your site to have traffic and stay relevant. This is the cyber sphere’s version of Word of Mouth.  Who knew? Not me, that’s for sure. So, to do this I started listing my recent blog entries on facebook .This helped…some. It was my daughter who suggested I start using Twitter, google+ and Pinterest to broaden my approach. This is one of the reasons I keep her around: her marketing brilliance.

Again, this only went so far because you can’t tweet/face/post/pin/google just ONCE during the day. You have to do so repeatedly to compete with the nine gazilliongillion other posting/tweets/etc uploading every millisecond. One of my New Hampshire RWA sistahs likens Twitter to a  “drive by shooting.” Kids, I just don’t have time to stop what I’m doing every hour and post something new. Not only is it time sucking to do this, my memory isn’t what it used to be ( frickin’ menopause!)  and I forgot more times than I remembered to post.

Again, brilliant baby told me about a program that could help called HootSuite which allows you to schedule all your postings on social media sights so you can basically click it and forget it. ( Ron Popeil reference, anyone?)

Again, who knew??

I use Hootsuite everyday. It’s one of the first things I do when my insomnia drags me from bed. I set up Twitter, Facebook author page, Instagram and Pinterest post/alerts for alternating hours of the day. I spend from 15-20 minutes doing this in the morning and then basically forget about it the rest of the day, enabling me to devote my time to what I want to do, namely, writing.

My life is so much better now since I don’t have to worry about getting on my social media sites every 30 minutes. Don’t get me wrong – I still check stuff during the day. I love to retweet posts from authors I know, and God help me, I need to see what’s going on on facebook, but as far as my marketing promos go, Hootsuite has been such a blessing.

Check it out and see if it’s for you. It’s free, easy ( must be if I can do it!), convenient and non-time sucking.