Writers, Is It Time to Review Your Social Media Strategy?

Do you plan your posts and have a vision of what you share on your social media sites, or do you just post when time allows? If you're posting regularly, it may be time to look at your overall plan. Here are seven tips that helped me figure out what was getting attention. I changed my posts to match those that were getting the most attention.

1. Look at your posts. Only 20% (maybe 10-15%) should be "buy my book" posts. You need to make sure that you share others' materials and post/share interesting and useful information to your followers. Make sure to tag people. It boosts the coverage of your post.

2. Look at your analytics on the sites that you use regularly. Are your posts being viewed, commented on, or shared? Look at your top performing posts. You need to do more of those and less of the ones that are being ignored.

3. Also look at the day and time of your posts. My tweets that get the most attention are after 11:00 PM on week nights. Since I'm not usually up then, I tend to schedule more tweets during that timeframe. After a month or so of data, you'll start to see a pattern of when you get the most traffic.

4. Make sure that your social media sites drive traffic to your website/blog. I schedule 5-6 tweets each day for my current and older blog posts. I also put my new blog posts on Google+, Goodreads, my Amazon author site, and my author Facebook page. Look at your analytics to see what is being viewed. That should help you target your content. I also use Bitly to shorten URLs, and this has a click counter, another good measure of what is being opened.

Your blog should be on or linked to your website, so that visitors can also see your events, give-aways, and books.

5. Make sure that you use hashtags that apply to your post. They do help people find topics of interest in a sea of information. This is key for Instagram and Twitter.

6. Autoposting is great and it saves a lot of time. Just be careful that not everything is linked. You don't always want the same post to appear the same way on each site. For example, if you autotweet your Facebook posts, the image appears as a link and your content is also truncated. In the Twitter world, that may not attract viewers. Hashtags work on most social media sites, but tags often don't. You probably want to customize posts for different social media platforms.

7. Look at the content of your posts. These are social media sites. If people are engaging you in conversation and you don't respond, you're losing opportunities to build relationships and contacts.

Best wishes for your writing and postings. Here are my links. Stop in for a visit.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeatherWeidner1

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HeatherWeidnerAuthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heather_mystery_writer/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8121854.Heather_Weidner

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HeatherBWeidner/