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Welcome to Season 3 of The Book Marketing Action Podcast with Becky Robinson, where we give you information that you can immediately implement to increase your influence and market your books more successfully.
This episode is about how authors can find a balance between their writing and their marketing efforts. Becky is joined by Megan Ericson–Social Media Marketing Expert, Director of Growth at hope*writers, and Host of Megan’s Social Media Marketing Show–who reveals what authors can do to ease the anxiety that marketing brings, and ensure that their social media channels offer value, while still having time to focus on their writing.
Key Points From This Episode
[02:01] Megan and Becky discuss the latest social media craze: BeReal.
[04:16] Learn more about Megan, where she lives, her work in the world, and her connection to authors and writing.
[06:46] Megan reveals what can work well for authors who are toggling back and forth between their writing deadlines and their marketing efforts.
[12:45] Discover Megan’s favorite content scheduling tools and the benefits of each one.
[15:47] Megan shares content ideas for both fiction and nonfiction authors who may be coming up short on creativity and knowing what to post.
[19:41] What would Megan say to an emerging author who doesn’t have a large following or fanbase yet, but wants to reach a larger audience online? She outlines some advice.
[21:41] Megan explains some of the mistakes she sees writers make when they try to get started creating content for social media.
[26:05] Megan shares some final thoughts about social media marketing.
Action Steps:
- Investigate one of the scheduling tools–MeetEdgar, Iconosquare, and Later–that Megan mentions. Get started with using one or more of them so that your social media marketing content can be batched.
- Start keeping track of your social media metrics. Create a spreadsheet where you can log followers, engagement rates, and top-performing posts each month to continue improving your strategies and performance.
Resources:
- Follow Megan on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Explore Megan’s website for opportunities to work with her.
Tweetables and quotes:
If you choose to share on Twitter, don’t forget to tag @beckyrbnsn and @MeganEricson so they know you enjoyed this episode!
I love writers, and I love their art and that heart to get their really important messages out into the world. —Megan Ericson
There are a lot of emotions and feelings all wrapped up in social media when you are a writer. —Megan Ericson
I call it procrastinating from writing–when writers scroll on social media thinking they’re doing something productive to build their platform, when really the productive thing they could be doing is spending their time off the platform planning and creating the content. —Megan Ericson
All of these platforms are designed to suck you in and keep you on that platform. That’s the big struggle there. —Megan Ericson
Don’t feel bad if people aren’t responding to your captions at first when you’re starting out, because it is a specialized skill that can be learned. —Megan Ericson
Studies have come back saying that if you include an emoji in your caption, it will perform better than if you don’t. —Megan Ericson
If you found value in today’s episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to share it with someone else who might benefit from it. If you have any questions or topics you’d like us to cover, please email Becky Robinson here.
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I am the founder/CEO of the Weaving Influence team, the author of Reach: Creating the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause, and the host of the Book Marketing Action Podcast. I’m a wife and mom of three kids, and I enjoy running, reading, writing, coffee, and dark chocolate.