Friday 26 February 2016

Knowing your FOMO from your MOMO

So I had planned to do a blog post on the new rules of social media. With a new book coming out soon... Yes, Poison in the Water should be released  by the end of April, I thought I would look at my social media tactics and perhaps give them a bit of a refresh because we all know that Social Media is here to stay and we need to raise our profiles and brand awareness as authors (blah blah blah ... yes, we rather be writing). And of course I thought I would share this information with you!, but when I got down to it I realised I wasn't going to be doing anything too different. Just a little more of what I should have been doing. Confused? read on.

So  I joined Crowdfire. Which I had avoided until recently, because I thought it was too impersonal, but now I'm a fan. Twitter is just too big otherwise. So better late to the party than never. If you haven't joined Crowdfire join it now - because sneaky tweeps follow you for a follow back and then un-follow you. Crowdfire is the only way to stay on top of this in this dog-eat-dog world!

How do I feel about Twitter? In all honesty I think 9 out of 10 people on twitter are trying to promote or sell something. If you are an author you follow other writers – you get bombarded with promotions for other books. You try and retweet them to get some retweets yourself – but which consumer is actually going to see this? There are some, of course. Every tweeter has non-promoters following them – be it friends or family and they may read a retweet – after all their newsfeed isn’t clogged with a million authors trying to sell their latest release. So although I don’t think Twitter is the best way to promote your book I think it’s worth sending tweets now and again – but remember with the intense traffic they do suggest that you tweet 7-9 times a day with the best times to tweet being at lunch times, after 930pm and around 7:30am.  My advice- Get the app, do it from your phone and be tweet smart and link your blog (if you have one) to twitter to automatically tweet about your blog post (I covered the linking of social media accounts in my last social media post).
 
And speaking of social media, did I tell you that I did an interview about social media and my tactics in Mary Cavanagh's new book - Calling All Authors?  It's a great little book if you are after some sound advice on what publishing route to take and of course for the do's and don'ts's of social media.

I have to admit that I am not as good as marketing my books on-line as I used to be.

Why? Because life happens. One minute you are plugging your new book and the other you are completing a quantity surveying course, mastering dishes from Ottolenghi’s new cookbook and watching Netflix. So okay, I got a little tired of talking about my books and followed my desire to do nothing for a while. After all, authors want to write not publicise and promote. You could say that I lost the bug – like the travel bug, the author promotion bug can take you by surprise and push you to do stuff you wouldn’t normally do (Especially when you can see the results in your sales). I feel I am waffling a bit now… But what I mean to say is that I think I have got the social media bug again. Hence the regular blog posts.

So social media is constantly evolving and the young ones and I mean seriously young seem to take to it so easily – I mean they even learn coding at school  - but it is a bit of an effort for the not so technically/showy offy minded. And I recently read an article in the Guardian where celebs are actually avoiding Social Media – having a bit of an outage for certain events etc. Apparently it’s called MOMO – mystery of missing out. So in layman’s terms if everyone is quiet on social media – you are missing you and you don’t even know what it is you are missing out on – that is the mystery!

I had just got to grips with what FOMO was – the fear of missing out!

I realised on my social media quest that I have to use the social media sites I am already connected to, but smarter (a bit like the twitter times as above) and with more frequency. So more Facebook posts, productive tweets and an updated website. Check it out at www.marissadeluna.com

So, I am sticking to the traditional channels but I am upping my game – being more active means I should increase followers, page likers etc. You’ve got to start (again) somewhere

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