Making Time for Social Media for Your Business or Book

I asked people on the Miller Mosaic email optin list what questions they had about social media and WordPress websites.

In response there were several interesting questions. And here is the first one I'm going to answer:

I've been soaking up information on social media and blogs for over a year now, and it is a staggering amount of stuff to process. With a new, first book due out this fall, I barely have anything in place online — there haven't been enough hours in the day.

An online presence is a necessity, but how can a new, self-published author possibly build a decent presence in short order without involving substantial dollars?

Very true that there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done for one's business or book and still do social media without spending tons of money.

So what should all of us do?

Prioritize our time after starting with a good foundation.

What's a good foundation?

Whether for a business or a book, a self-hosted website on which you can easily add information and which is search engine friendly and social media friendly is a necessity.

Yes, this usually involves money unless you are good with html code. Unfortunately the alternative, using a free template to instantly create a website or a hosted blog, is unlikely to be search engine friendly and possibly not even user friendly.

Once you have a good website home base established, you need a strategy for allotting a small amount of time for social media participation — perhaps 30 minutes a day in 10-minute segments once things are set up properly.

(Now if you want to blog, which is a good way to add content to your website (and thus make the search engines happy), this will take more time. Or you can have guest bloggers and not do any blogging yourself. )

Yael and I are partial to having effective accounts on three major social media sites: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook (a Page for your business or book and not just a Profile – see Miller Mosaic post "Clarifying Facebook Profiles and Facebook Pages.")

We also like YouTube for up-close-and-personal videos of real people talking about a business or book. But, of course, these can be added at a later date.

Yes, I know this sounds like a lot. But you don't need to do everything at once.

Remember the saying "Slow and steady wins the race"? It's a good motto for learning how to use social media to connect with prospective fans of your business or book.

In other words, you can't build an online presence "in short order" without spending a lot of money on outside help. But you can start building slowly to continually gain more connections.



LinkedIn: If you are a writer (and a book author by definition is a writer), setting up a LinkedIn profile should be relatively easy to do. Yes, there are some techniques to make your profile more effective. But if you don't do these at first, you'll still be fine.

And while you should join some LinkedIn groups (and have the group logos display on your profile), you do not have to engage in conversations until you are comfortable doing so.

You can even start your own group if there's a topic related to your business or book that you think isn't being sufficiently covered by other groups.

When you are comfortable with LinkedIn and can manage your participation in about 10 minutes a day, then you can expand.

Facebook: Next I would recommend going to Facebook and getting a Profile account in order to enable you to set up a Facebook Page for your business or book. Again, once the Page is set up, you don't have to spend so much time on it. But you do want to share good content on it.

Twitter: Finally, Yael's and my favorite. Now we admit Twitter may not be for everyone. But oh is it powerful! Here's one example that happened a couple of hours before I wrote this post:

I'm the research assistant on Yael's Middle Grade book project (see www.HurricaneHoodoo.com). She wanted to know exactly which neighborhoods flooded in which order during Hurricane Katrina.

Do you know what I did? As a former newspaper journalist, I searched on Twitter for people from the Times-Picayune (the well-known newspaper in New Orleans) and I tweeted my specific info request to three people I found through searching.

Within a few hours I had the most amazing answer from Times-Picayune arts and entertainment editor @AnnMaloneyTP – the newspaper has an interactive timeline show of the flooding by neighborhood. (If you want to see this incredible interactive show, go to http://bit.ly/iU0h7p )

I tweeted thanks to Ann and she tweeted back that she was glad to help. (And, no, I don't know her and she doesn't know me. But the Twitter community is a shared info site.)

I tell this story as a small sample of why it can be worthwhile to commit to spending a little time each day on your social media activities. The results that you may get with your commitment and persistence may lead to totally unexpected and rewarding places.

Just keep in mind the turtle and the hare.

© 2011 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ZimblerMiller and Yael K. Miller can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MillerMosaicLLC



Miller Mosaic has a set of three how-to social media videos – Twitter, Facebook Page and LinkedIn – to help people set up their accounts on these sites.