My Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media & Marketing
Since my book came out in April, I’ve been engaged in a lot (and I mean, A LOT) of social media marketing. In the past few weeks (since my return from the Italy/Spain trip), I’ve had some time to really dig back in again before school starts up next week.
On the one hand, I LOVE it. Or at least, I’m totally fascinated by it. I’m wondering what will work and what won’t work. And sometimes the results are very interesting. I’m thinking things like . . .
- How can I promote this awesome review I got on Readers’ Favorite? I’ve tweeted it, pinned it, and posted it to both my personal and professional Facebook pages. So far I’m getting the most likes on my personal Facebook page. But is that helping? Most of those people have already bought the book.
- How do I make really attractive Pinterest pins that people will repin and that will bring traffic to my website? I wrote a whole blog post on that one.
- What hashtags work the best in Twitter?
- How do I make press releases that actually show up in online newspapers?
- How do I can get more Pinterest followers? (I’ve quadrupled my followers in the last week. Of course, my numbers were small, so it wasn’t too hard. Ha! Follow me here, if you want to help my Pinteresting crusade. Leave me a note in the comments of this post, and I’ll follow you back.)
- How do I get more subscribers to my monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to learn about my writing news, appearances, and giveaways.
- Should I have a YouTube channel? Guess what? Yes, I should. And do. It only has two videos so far, but still. Come visit me.
On the other hand, I HATE it. It’s sucking up my time. I follow one lead to build up my social media marketing and end up down a whole rabbit hole of information that makes the beautiful summer day outside suddenly disappear. What happened to my day? I’ve been tied to my laptop, my phone, and my iPad.
Argh! And I used to think marketing was boring! My college roommate majored in it, and I couldn’t figure out why. Of course, that was all before the social media explosion. I wonder if they teach a whole course in social media marketing in colleges now.
Got any social media marketing tips for me? I’d love to hear them! Of course, I may never again see the light of day if you do share them.
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While reading your post I could really relate to an interest taking up way too much time. I too find I can easily disappear down the rabbit hole of my interests and often wonder if by doing this I’m missing out on the important things in life.
Yes, I worry about missing out on important things, too. Prioritizing can be hard once you’ve fallen into the rabbit hole.
I’ve come to comment a couple of times…but haven’t because I’ve been clicking links! One blogging tip for you…I learned early on to always have links open in a new tab. I can show you how to do it manually, or just click that box when you enter the link in WordPress.
My Klout score has dropped dramatically this summer because I haven’t been on social media!
Shoot! I forgot to click the box to have them open in a new tab. Is there a way to default to that?
I haven’t found a default, but if you type target=”_blank” after your link in the text mode, it will open in a new tab. Like this:
your words here.
Whoops! Let me try again:
your text here
Shoot, I can’t make it not link up! Sorry!
I hear you on this. I hate social media yet know I need to embrace it. Maybe we need a social media boot camp with love meeting one night.
Ha! That meeting could go on for hours. 🙂
Guess what, this is exactly what everyone else in the world is trying to figure out too, especially companies. Social media is just the current ‘new’ media. Look at it historically – people had to figure out how to do newspaper ads for decades, (and still do,) then came radio and they had to figure out how to use it for ads, then came tv, then came cable tv, then the internet in general, and now social media. But that’s also where having a degree in marketing is a double-edged sword, as you can draw on what you know about existing media and project it on the new media, but only to a point, after which you just have to figure out what works for the new that couldn’t or wouldn’t in the old.