mjones | Social Media Aspirin™

December 17, 2018January 11, 2019

Create a Partnership with Your Social Media Manager

If you’re a writer or author, you know that leveraging social media while building your writer platform is not optional – it’s necessary! Partnering with a social media manager helps tremendously.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress blog, Goodreads, Pinterest, Snapchat…did this partial list of social media sites overwhelm you? Does the social media beast seem enormous, time consuming, and hard to tame? The answer: partnership.

Partnering with a social media manager relieves the daily maintenance stress of your social media presence, AND you don’t have to keep up with the daily changes happening on every social media platform.

Social media managers work within your marketing plan (you do have one, right? complete with a budget for social media, right?) to ensure your online presence supports your writer and author goals whether you want to drive traffic to your blog, build awareness for your products or services, or increase book sales.

Based on your writer and authors goals, your manager helps develop a social media game plan including setting up profiles if needed, devising and managing a consistent posting schedule, and engaging with your fans through online conversation.

A good social media manager reviews progress with you every month, suggests improvements or changes when necessary, keeps up with social media changes and news, researches your industry for engaging content to share with fans, and communicates with you immediately if an issue or question arises.

Choosing to work with a social media manager is an investment of your resources and some of your time. They are also investing in you as a client. Work with them as a partner in your writer or author journey.

It’s worth it to invest in a productive social media manager partnership.

Melody Jones is Dispenser-in-Chief of Social Media Aspirin™ for Writers and Authors. She helps take the pain out of social media! Check out her services and learn how your can reduce your social media pain – and get back to doing what you love.

September 2, 2016January 11, 2019

How to Avoid the “Sweet Meteor of Death” Managing Your Social Media

Does social media feel like a heavy soul-crushing obligation? You’re not the only one with those sentiments.

Here’s a testimonial snippet from an attendee of a recent speaking engagement:

“Most of the time we’d walk out of the talk feeling a heavy obligation hanging over our heads like the sweet meteor of death, eager to crush our souls. Melody made [social media] sound like fun and doable, instead of an arcane process involving ritual sacrifices.”

That’s right: social media can be fun and is doable! No meteor of death necessary.

Tools Aren’t Just for Carpenters – or People Who Work on Space Stuff

For the sake of this blog post, I’m assuming you already have a social media account somewhere, be it Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn or one of several others.

Now your job is to learn a few tools so you can manage your social media. There’s a learning curve, of course, but once you get them figured out, your social media life will be easier. All of these have free versions that work just fine for the beginner, and when you’re ready to advance, there are paid versions to help support you.

HootSuite

This tried and true social media management tool has been around a long time and remains a great way to manage multiple accounts. Over 10 million people use it. You can manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Foursquare and WordPress blogs using one dashboard.

You don’t have to give a hoot about some kind of death by meteor.

Buffer

This is another tool to manage postings to multiple social media accounts. You can manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ pages and Pinterest (only with paid versions). As they say on their About page: “You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you well spaced out over the day – and at the best times.”

That’s right. They’ll do the heavy thinking. They’re buffering you from that meteor. Yeah, I went there.

Canva

With today’s visual-intensive online environment, you must include graphics in your social media marketing or miss out on engagement opportunities. Along comes Canva. It’s easy to learn for those who are not graphic artists and has a variety of free templates and graphics to use in your designs. You can look like you know what you’re doing.

And if you wanted to create a graphic using the “sweet meteor of death” – you could. There’s no judgment on Canva.

LibreStock

To help make your Canva experience go smoothly, it’s best to have a source of free-to-use graphics beyond what they offer. LibreStock has a great tagline: “Search the best 47 free stock photo websites in one place.” They’ll do the searching for you.

Just from a statistics standpoint, it seems reasonable that at least one of those 47 sites has a meteor photo or graphic. And ponies. And serious business people doing serious business things. You can find anything there.

Feedly

Feedly is a content curation tool where you can add websites that relate to your industry in one place. Just log in and you can easily see the latest postings in the dashboard without having to move all over the internet looking for your fave sites. It even integrates with Buffer to make it extra-easy to share relevant content with your audience.

We like extra-easy – because death meteors aren’t. They’re difficult.

Give yourself the gift of tools and the gift of time to learn these tools, and I promise you’ll avoid the sweet meteor of death caused by the overwhelm of social media. You can be meteor-free and socially successful.

What tools do you use to make social media easier?

Melody Jones is Founder and CEO of Social Media Management Services. Melody is your Social Media Aspirin, here to take the pain away so you can go about your business. Visit her list of services to learn about her programs, upcoming workshops, and coaching services.

July 21, 2016July 17, 2016

Wordless Wednesday on SMMS

On many Wednesdays, I post something fun, interesting, or beautiful in graphic or photo form. It’s my way of taking a small break on the constant highway of social media talk.

This week I do have to use a few words. I wanted to share my photo of pink petunias taken in the downtown area where I live in Colorado. Then I used two different apps to change what the photo looks like: Prisma and Waterlogue. These could easily be used for blog posts and social media graphics. Cool, huh!

Pink Petunias, Parker, Colorado — The original photo of pink petunias taken in downtown Parker, Colorado, by Melody Jones.

Pink Petunias, bold watercolor — Same pink petunia photo now run through the watercolor painting app called Waterlogue, more bold tones.

Pink petunias, light watercolor — Same pink petunia photo through the watercolor painting app called Waterlogue, in light tones.

Pink petunias — Same pink petunia photo now using the app Prisma to make changes. Beautiful!

Blue petunias — Another Prisma photo of those same pink petunias, but aren’t they striking in these blue tones.