The point of social media

Be the leader (photo by Svilen Milev)

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If you’re going to use social media to promote your book, you should know your goals and have reasonable expectations. You must keep in mind that social media is not designed to serve direct sales. It’s about brand awareness and building credibility which ultimately will lead to sales.

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If I look at my authors and pick out the best selling books, I find that the best selling books are the ones that have a “brand” behind them. That sometimes is a literal brand-name like a magazine that has put out a book or it can be an author who has established himself/herself as a brand either through continuously putting out good books or becoming an authoritative figure on their topic in the real world and online. That’s what it means to be a brand–someone with some credibility that people will return to again and again. Once people trust you, then they’ll buy your book.

When you think of brand names, you can usually associate words and feelings with them. Let’s try. What do you think of when you hear “Wal-Mart”? What about “Cheetos?” “Nintendo.” “Gucci.” Now think about what words you want people to associate with your name-as-brand. Dependable? Informative? Fun? You decide. Now you know your goal. To make people think of those words when they think of you.

That said, social media can affect sales in a nearly direct way if you position your social media strategy so that your main goal is to collect emails for your mailing list. Mailing lists are still the best and most direct ways to get your customers to buy from you.

Useful Links:
Is brand awareness the number one social media goal? (Small Business Trends)
The difference between social media and traditional marketing in 2 sentences (Your Social Media Marketing Resource)

Blogs – The Basics

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Very briefly, a blog (short for web log) is a collection of articles that you post online. It orders it so the most recent is always on top. The idea is to get people coming back to your blog regularly. As an author, this is not your personal diary about your cat and your trip to the beach and what you’re making for dinner. You want to stay on the topic of writing and on the topics that relate to your book. Posts do not have to be long and sprawling, and shouldn’t be. 300 words is good. You want to post at a steady rate. Don’t wear yourself out by posting five posts the first week and none the next. Your readers need to know what to expect.

Here is an excellent article on how to manage your time and ideas in blogging: 10 Tips to help you write your blogging butt off (Ink Rebels) *one of my favs*

There is some debate whether it’s better to have your blog on your website or on a separate service. If you decide to go the separate service route, as I have, here are some options:
WordPress.com: Not terribly intuitive but extremely flexible as far as layout. You can make your blog look like anything you want! Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to use. Free.
Blogger.com: Extremely intuitive and user-friendly. Fairly flexible, but with some layout restrictions. Free.
Livejournal.com: Fairly easy to use, very restricted in terms of layout, but much more community centered than other blogger services. It’s more interactive with other bloggers. Free.
Typepad: I haven’t used it much myself. I think you have to pay for it.
Tumblr: You can only post one piece of media per post (ie. one picture with a caption or one video with caption). Great for visual books with photos to share. Free.

Other Useful Links:
3 Not so obvious things your blog needs (Open Forum)

Popular Mistakes #1 – Not Blogging

Oops

I get asked a lot why more traffic isn’t going to the author’s blog. The blog is up, it has a good name, lots of keywords and links, some good content posted, and the author is all ready to become an authority figure on their subject. But why aren’t people coming to the blog, and why aren’t the few that do come returning?

Your blog is not your website! Your website can be stable (not static exactly, but stable at least) with few updates needed to keep people coming back. It’s the number one resource and hub when it comes to all things YOU. Your blog, on the other hand, has to be maintained regularly. You can decide if you want to post daily, twice a week, or weekly, but you have to stick to it. Not just for a few weeks, but keep it up. Of course people aren’t going to return to your blog if it hasn’t been updated in four months. And if they’re not returning to your blog, you’re not establishing yourself as an authority figure, and if you’re not doing that, then you’re not getting your book sold.

This may seem like obvious advice, but I can’t tell you how often I see this mistake. So keep it in mind through the whole six months, year, two years that you’re spending publicizing this book. BLOG REGULARLY!

Facebook – The Basics

These could be your fans

You’ve never used Facebook before, but everyone keeps saying it’s so good for your online presence as an author. But you don’t really know the first thing about it. This post is for you.

There is a profile page and there is a Fan Page. This post is meant to help you distinguish between them.

When you go to facebook.com, it will prompt you to sign up. All you need is a name, email address, and birthday. Your name should be your real name (or you might be able to get away with your valid pen name) because Facebook will delete your account if they find out that your profile is not a real person. You have to give your birthday only because they want to make sure you’re twelve years old or older–you can select not to display your birthday to anyone in your privacy settings. Your email address has to be your valid email address, but it doesn’t have to be the main one you use. You can set up Facebook to email you whenever someone writes on your wall, sends you a message, etc.

Congratulations. You’ve created a profile. You do not have to add anything else to your profile, but you’re certainly welcome to. If you are concerned about privacy, then don’t put a photo of yourself or tell Facebook anything you don’t want people to know. It can’t invade your privacy if you don’t offer up your secrets. Everyone who joins Facebook automatically gets a profile. But not everyone has a Fan Page–you have to create one yourself.

The real way to get fans isn’t from your profile. It’s from your Fan Page. Your Fan Page will have all the content you want to give away about your book, you as an author, your other projects. Remember to be transparent without losing your privacy. Here, you should add a photo of you or your book. You should add tabs to display exclusive content. Make the wall a platform for conversation among you and your fans. (To create a Fan Page, after you log in, go to facebook.com/pages and click Create Page in the upper right.)

“A Fan Page is searchable in google. A profile is not.” –Cindy Ratzlaff

A Fan Page looks like this: http://www.facebook.com/plainketchup

Your friends are connected to your profile. Your fans are connected to your Fan Page. You get friends by searching their names in the search bar, clicking request friend, and waiting for them to accept (they may also search for you and request to be your friend). A friend is someone you have allowed see your whole profile page. You can change your privacy settings so that only friends see your whole profile, friends of friends, or everyone. (Friends is recommended.) You get fans by accumulating people who have clicked the “like” button on your Fan Page. You do not have to invite or confirm their fan-ship. You can, however, invite your friends to also become fans by clicking “suggest to friends” under your picture on the Fan Page. Here is another post I did on how to best use your Fan Page.

Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

photo by Stephen Eastop

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You may have heard the marketing buzz words Web 1.0 and 2.0 around. You may have even heard of Web 3.0. Though you may not be using Web 3.0 now, it’s important to at least be aware of what it is, that this revolution is coming, that it is in your hands, and how it will impact your digital identity as a writer.

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What is Web 1.0?
Web 1.0 is the first concept of the internet. A small percentage of people create websites and the rest of us read the content. It’s the standard creator to consumer model.

What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 turns all consumers into consumers/creators. This comes from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also with any interactive platform like chats. The consumer is interacting and creating. Now the original creators (for sake of example, let’s say the original creators were published authors) can still create, but they are now competing with all their previous consumers who are now web-authors themselves. This can be tricky, and the key is to gain credibility and produce unique content that people will actually want to view. But the good thing for the published authors are that you can now get feedback from your consumers without having to do any research.

What is Web 3.0?
This revolution isn’t entirely here yet, but it is coming. (See slideshow in my Useful Links for a great explanation.) It hinges on the development of a semantic web that can understand the context of words based on every website and application being connected and getting their information from each other independently of human beings. Is this scary? Is this sci-fi? Is this artificial intelligence? Any which way, it’s the future.

How does this affect you as a writer? Well, it may help you make money. Perhaps someday, Web 3.0 will pave the road to authors being able to quit their day jobs and focus on just writing. Once an intelligent web is able to tap into everything human beings are putting into it, it will be able to not only have access to things that no one person has ever had access to, but it will be able to analyze the data with formulas that the programmers give it in order to work out supply and demand. If your work is in high demand, someone may just pay you to do it.

This has been an over simplified look at Web 3.0. There is a lot more out there. And a lot more coming.

Useful Links:
The Web 3.0 Slideshow (Sophotec)

How do I know if people are reviewing my book?

You have now contacted a ton of bloggers, websites, and the digital versions of many magazines, newspapers, and radio shows. Don’t expect them all to let you know when they’ve posted something about your book. Some may do it months or even years down the line depending on how many review copies they have stacked on their desks. So how do you find out when someone’s posted about your book? This is actually pretty easy.

1. Google Alerts
I like Google Alerts because it goes right to my email inbox whenever something appears on the web, and I can choose if I want it to email me each time something appears or compile them all into one email per day or per week. You will get some irrelevant links if someone is selling your book on e-bay or if it’s being sold in an ad on the sidebar. But it’s pretty thorough. And free!

You don’t have to sign up to anything. Just go to the Google Alert page and fill out the information. Make sure you confirm each search you do when it sends you an email asking for verification. It will only let you do a few in a row before you’ll need to verify. But if you only have one book, you’ll only need one or two alerts. Make sure it’s unique enough that you’re not going to get alerts about things that aren’t your book, but don’t be so specific that you’re going to miss out on some posts. For example, let’s take a non-fiction book because they usually have subtitles. If the book is “Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews”  by Sam Weller, I’m not just going to type “Listen to the Echoes” because you’ll get tons of hits about other echoey things. I would probably type “Listen to the Echoes” AND (“Sam Weller” OR “Bradbury”)

Now you’re going “What’s all this parentheses and quotes and capital ANDs and ORs business?” That’s called Boolean language, and it is a search engine language that works like a math problem. Anything outside of the parentheses, the search engine will look for, but only if it is near the words “Sam Weller” or “Bradbury,” but “Sam Weller” and “Bradbury” don’t both have to be there. Here’s a great article (with pictures) on how to use Boolean language.

2. Paid Services
There are many services like this. I use Burrelles Luce. This one is not free like Google Alerts, but it will pick up things that Google did not. Likewise, Google will pick up things Burrelles did not. It is useful to have both. Like Google Alerts, it uses Boolean language. You can have it watch for as many entries as you like. Instead of going to your email, you simply log on, and it lists all the recent activity online with your search terms, and categorizes them by date. You can also request that they send you physical clippings in the mail. Here is the website if you would like to try it out.

The Art of the Sidebar

 

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You might think that the sidebar on your blog is just a place to stick extra information if you have it, but it is a crucial tool for getting your readers orientated. Without the proper information and widgets here, you can lead your readers astray. Here are some things you may want to include in your sidebar.

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About
This comes in two parts: about you and about this blog. You want to keep your personal bio short and sweet. Here’s an article on how to do that. It can include a photo, contact link, and links to your social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter. About this blog should be short and sweet too. Try to tell them in once sentence what they can expect from your blog.

Best Content
These are your “internal links.” Pick the few best blog posts that you have that are either good enough to make readers want to read more or are the posts that explain something important, for instance a short synopsis about your book and where to buy it would be a good post to highlight here. You can change these as time passes.

Categories or Archive
See my sidebar on the left? It has all my posts broken into categories like blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. When you arrive to my blog, you get all of my posts. But if you only wanted to read my posts about Facebook, you could click on Facebook and get all those posts on one page. WordPress allows you to do this. If your blog is more like a diary than something people will want to view in categories, you can have an archive separated by day, month, or year. Blogger.com sets one up for you by default (but you can delete it if you don’t want it). These things allow easy navigation rather than paging through your entire blog one screen at a time.

Blogroll
These are your “external links.” A blogroll is a list of blogs (hyperlinked to be clickable) that you read, preferably ones that your readers will be interested in too. If you have a lot of favorite blogs, you may want to have multiple blogrolls broken into categories like “Book Blogs” and “Cooking Blogs” and “My Friends’ Blogs.”

Widgets and Gadgets
Widgets can be the saving grace or the brutal murder of your sidebar. There are many third-party widgets out there that can do anything from tell you the time, tell you how many people visited your site, show your favorite YouTube videos, display interactive games, provide a search bar, and much more. Make sure that it’s important, that you’re not creating clutter, and that it doesn’t cause your page to load slowly.

Badges
As long as you don’t get carried away, badges are not a bad idea. They provide a simple graphic in the sidebar which is eye-catching. They also show your affiliation to online groups and causes, giving your readers some insight into you and feeling a better connection. It’s also free advertising for your favorite web places.

Subscribe
Make it easy for your fans to subscribe to you by creating an RSS feed. Here’s an article on how to do that on Blogger.com.

Ads
Obviously you don’t have to have ads on your blog. It’s just a nice way to make money. It might even help your SEO. Check out eHow for details.

Useful Links:
Most Popular Blog Sidebar Items (Bash Bosh)
What You Should and Shouldn’t Have on Your Blog’s Sidebar (Social Mouths)
Basic Tips Part 1 and Part 2 (Wayneliew.com)
5 Items Your Blog Sidebar Must Have (Blogging Tips)

Interactive Books

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Now, you may not think that an interactive book falls under the category of social media because it’s the format of the actual product, not just a way to publicize it. But look out. The divide between format and publicity is collapsing. An interactive book is, by definition, social and it is, by definition, media. The ways to make a social book are so limitless, you’re likely to invent a way of your own. Let’s look at some examples to get your muse fired up.

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Books that are printed and then interactive:

Skeleton Creek
This is a book series. The reader buys the book, which is a back and forth between two protagonists, one writing and the other emailing video blogs to the first. You read a chapter from the first protagonist and then there is a website and password at the end of the chapter. You log onto that site and watch the vlog of the second protagonist. Then go back to the book. It goes back and forth multiple times to heighten the tension of this creepy mystery series for kids. Check out the Skeleton Creek website. If you scroll to the right on the video bar, there is one video called How To that explains it all.

Trackers
Kind of along the same lines is Trackers. There’s a book, and there are videos on the website–both which are critical in the telling of the story.

Cathy’s Book
Here is a book that comes with not only websites but phone numbers to help tell the story. And it is available in audio format. And there is now an app to go with it. Try the book out yourself.

Books that are interactive before they’re printed:

Loser Queen
Then there are the books that users help create. Like Loser Queen, where you can read chapters online and vote on how the next one will go. The book eventually will be printed as a book for sale.

Burbank with a Baedeker
This is the fictional blog of fictional author Milo H. Tomb. It’s written from the point of view of people who don’t exist. And the comments are just as much a part of the story as the posts. But here’s the fun part: Readers can leave comments on the blog, interact with the characters, and in some cases even change the outcome of the story. The story is over now, but you can go back and see what occurred while it was live and even add more comments if you’d like.

Neil Gaiman’s Twitter Book
With BBC Audio Books America, fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman has created a novel by taking fans’ input on Twitter. Gaiman tweeted the first line. Fans using the hashtag #bbcawdio wrote the next lines. BBC moderated it to keep the story somewhat cohesive all the way until the end of the book. Then it’s recorded in the studio as an audio book.

And beyond!

With the development of Four Square and Facebook Places, can you create a city-wide interactive novel that causes people to go out and find parts of the story around town (like a scavenger hunt)–through pages, wall scrawl, actors, video, word of mouth, etc.? What about smart phone apps? What about the advancement of eReaders? Will Choose Your Own Adventure books come back via a digital media? Will you read, watch, and listen all on the same device? Open your mind. Many companies are already publishing enhanced ebooks for e-readers and the iPad.

Useful Links:
A Primer on Interactive Books (Edutopia)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Authors ask me all the time why their websites, blogs, and Facebook Fan Pages don’t appear on the first, second, third, fifteenth page of Google after doing a search for related words. There is no magic button to make your website appear on the first page of the search. It’s tangled in a science called SEO. There are people whose entire job is understanding SEO, so don’t feel lost if you can’t figure it out right away. But here are some little things that you can do to increase your SEO.

Content
The most important thing you can do to make Google like you is to provide good content and to update it frequently.

Links
You’ll want to link to relevant sites and get relevant sites to link to you. You may do this in a kind letter letting the webmasters know how much you enjoy their site and how you’ve linked to theirs on your own, which may be of interest to them. Don’t forget that the words you hyperlink should describe or be the name of the site, not the words “click here.”

Buying Google Key Terms
This is something you have to pay for. You can pay Google to link your website with certain words, which will nudge your site toward the top.

No Graphic Text or Flash
Don’t use pictures or Flash media instead of words. Google can only read words if they are actually hilightable text. If you do use an image, at least include alternative text or a caption so Google has something to pick up on.

Keywords
You want to get all the important words on your site, preferably in the title and web address. By important words, I mean words that people who should find your site will most likely look for. For example, authors interested in social media will search something like “social media for authors” or “social networking for writers.” That is why both the URL and the text title say Social Media for Authors. The more specific the keywords, like longer keyword phrases, the better chance that you’ll be at the top of the search page.

Note: Beware of keyword stuffing. Google is getting smarter by the day. It knows when you’ve flooded your page with keywords just to get better SEO. Remember, content is king.

Popularity
Ultimately, you will get a better ranking if your site is popular. It will be popular if there’s A) Good content, as I said, and B) usability. Don’t let there be a single dead link. Make it look nice, easy to navigate. Don’t use forest green text on charcoal backgrounds. You know what I mean.

Useful Links
10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know (Inside Facebook)
55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love (Search Engine Journal)
9 Expert SEO Tips (Small Business Trends)
10 SEO Tools Every Blogger Must Use (Daily SEO Tip)

Virtual Book Launch Party

Kick off your blog tour with a party!

  Just like a live book tour, you can have a big event online to celebrate the release of your book. How do you hold a party online? A virtual book launch party can take all forms. It’s highly customizable and rich with multimedia. It’s not for authors who want to sit back and wait for the dough to roll it. It’s active and interactive. And it’s a lot of fun. 

First you will need a place to post all the information about your tour. This might be a post on your blog. This might be a tab on your Facebook Fan Page. This might be a page on your website. It might be all three. Here is where you want to send people whenever you want to inform them about your party. It should include all the events taking place at the book launch and what day and time it’s occurring. You can even add an RSVP if you want to get an idea of how many people will be involved. 

So what in the world do you do at a digital book launch party? Well, it really depends on your book. Be creative in thinking of what this audience will want most from you. Here are some ideas that other authors have used: 

• Live video chat: Blogtalkradio allows you to be on video answering questions while your fans are typing to you in the attached chat box.
• A printable cut-out game (cards, board, etc.) based on the adventure in the book
• Printable posters, cards, activity book, etc. to include in a gift bag
• A free download of the e-book (or just an excerpt)
• An audio or video of the author reading from the book
• TV interview clips
• Live Twitter chat in Q&A form
• Live Twitter scavenger hunt (using clues to locations of thing online) — don’t forget to offer prizes to winners
• Live webinar teaching something the book is based on
• Be creative. This is a platform just taking off. Be part of the new movement!

  

Good examples:
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon book launch (kids book)
Lessons to My Children book launch (finance book) 

Useful link:
Virtual Book Launch Parties (Book Marketing Maven)

Facebook Fan Page Tabs – Custom

Okay, so you have all the default tabs set up, but your Facebook Fan Page is lacking spark, no? Don’t worry. You can add as many custom pages as you want. Think of it like building your own website. Whatever you want on it, can be on it. Many people have actually deleted their websites in favor of just having a Facebook Fan Page. I don’t suggest you go that far, but it shows you how powerful this interface can be.

Welcome Tab
Probably the most important tab you can create is the landing page or welcome tab. You can title it anything you like, but the function of this page is to introduce new people to what you’re all about. Give a brief hello message and say exactly what this page is and what people can expect from it. Why should they bother “liking” your fan page? What’s in it for them? Mention a couple of your most important tabs, such as “Visit our WATCH TAB for book trailers and video interviews with [insert name].” Include a graphic or video to spice things up. If you have any sort of contest going right now, this is a great place to plug it. That alone could win you some fans.

There are two ways to create a Welcome Tab. One is to take Facebook’s template, which you can find here. You just click “add to my page,” select your page, and then on you page you click the + tab and select “Welcome.” On your page, when you click “edit my page,” you will have a box that says “Welcome.” You can choose to “edit” it to create your own custom content.

The other way to do it is when you have clicked “edit my page,” at the bottom of the page, you will see the option to add an FBML application. Click that, click “add to my page,” select your page, and then on your page you click the + tab and select “FBML.” On your page, when you click “edit my page,” you will have a box that says “FBML.” You can choose to “edit” it to create your own custom content including the title of the tab. FBML means that you can type words, format with codes like “<BR>” for line break, etc. You can add photos, videos, links, anything. See my post on FBML for details.

Here are some examples:
Sony
BBC World News
Campbells

In order to make this the default landing page for people who do not already “like” your page (the people who do “like” your page will go to your Wall), when you are on your page, click “options” (under the share button) and then “settings.” Change “default landing page for everyone else” to “Welcome” or whatever you’ve named you tab.

Free Stuff
A good tab to have is a “Free Stuff” tab. You will want to use a code that allows only people who “like” your page to have access to this content, but you want to make sure people know why they are looking at a blank page. Make it so people who don’t “like” your page yet get a message that says something like “Can’t see this page? No problem! Just click the “like” button up top and you will have access to [exclusive photos, excerpts, prizes, etc.].” How do you do this? Easy-peasy. In your FBML box, type this (and obviously replace the blue with what you want it to actually say):

<fb:fbml version="1.1">
<fb:visible-to-connection>
Fans will see this content.
<fb:else>Non-fans will see this content.</fb:else>
</fb:visible-to-connection>
</fb:fbml>

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Other Pages
Anything else is fair game. Have a page of interviews, some links to reviews or quote blurbs from reviews. If you’ve got a novel with lots of characters, maybe you want to have little character profiles. You can add a page that directly feeds from your Twitter account (see link below). You can have as many FBML boxes as you like. After creating the first one, you can add more by going into edit your first FBML box and at the bottom of your page, you will see the option to add another FBML box. Click that, and then an “edit” link will appear. Click that to edit your next FBML tab. That’s it!

Useful links:
How to add a custom tab to your facebook fan page (HighEdWebTech)
A Twitter Tab For Your Facebook Fan Page (Lynn and Justin)
Customize your fan page with a welcome tab (Make Use Of)
Show Content to Fans-Hide content from non-fans (HyperArts)
Reveal Tab (All Facebook)

Facebook Fan Page Tabs – Intro

Build Your FB Wall

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So, you’ve set up your new Facebook Fan Page. Way to go. But there are all these - to your Fan Page marked as tabs. What are they? I have a separate post for teaching you how to add new custom tabs and what those tabs should be. This post is an introduction

By default, you get these tabs: Wall, Info, Photos, and Discussions, with the option of adding Links, Events, Notes, and Video by clicking on the + tab and choosing the additional tabs you like. (But you can create custom tabs which I’ll get to in another post.)

. Tip: Make sure your URLs in your page description are complete (with http:// and all so that your links are live and people can click on them and not have to copy-paste.

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Wall
The Wall is where most of the action happens. It’s where your fans will land when they go to your Fan Page. You can post any announcements complete with text, photos, links, videos, or events. It’s best to add something to the wall at least once or twice a week. It’s like a mini blog or a twitter account. You can post links to reviews, tell people about contests and excerpts, things like that. Unlike Twitter, it’s not the best platform to dish out random bits of information on how you’re doing with your book etc. Think of it as the News page of your website.

Note: If you click “Options” under the Share button, you can decide if you want the default for everyone to only see what you’ve written, only what fans have written, or what you and fans have written. My suggestion is that if you don’t have a lot of activity from your fans on the wall, choose to have both you and fans. If you do have a lot of activity and your important posts are getting lost in the discussions, then choose just you. Fans can view any of these options–this is just to set up the default.

Info
The questions the info asks you varies on what kind of page you chose. You probably chose something like product or brand. It’s important to fill out the information here, but isn’t terribly useful because it’s not customizable.

Photos
Definitely upload some photos if you have them. Do your book covers, photos of events, author photos, etc. You can create separate albums if you’d like to stay organized.

Discussions
To be honest, most of the discussions are going to happen on your wall. But if you want to create organized discussions like a message board, the discussion tab is a good place to start. You can post a few discussions there and announce to the Wall that they’re there. Maybe you’ll get some bites. Questions might be: What’s your favorite book? or Who’s your favorite character in my novel? or Has anything like xyz (that happens to my main character) happened to you?

Links
Links are a great way to share any relevant links like other book blogs, references where you got your research, useful online writer tools, and of course your own links like your website and blog. Some links will be added automatically as you share them on your Wall.

Events
A great way, aside from booktour.com, to post events online is the Facebook Events. You can create one as yourself or as the moderator for your Fan Page. If you create one here on your Fan Page, it will post to your Fan Page Wall automatically, and you have the option of “updating” your fans, which will send them a message. Your events can be bookstore readings, radio interview broadcasts, etc. Some people also might want to use this feature to include stops on their blog tour. It lets you put in a photo (your book cover is a good idea), date, time, location, and description. You can also personalize invitations to your Facebook friends.

Notes
This might be a post that’s a little longer than the character limit on your Wall. Maybe you want to copy one of your blog posts here. Look at Simon & Schuster Careers to see what they’ve done with Notes. You can also tag friends in notes so that they get personal messages to let them know that a note has been published on a topic that may interest them.

Video
Personally, I don’t care for the video tab because I believe that means you have to upload your video to Facebook, which you’re welcome to do. Alternatively, you could create a custom video page which allows you to embed a video you uploaded from YouTube. Then you can put the videos where you want on the page, add photos, text, etc. along with the videos to make it look nice. I will talk about custom pages in the next post.

Best Tweets

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There is no mathmatical equation to getting Twitter followers, having influence, getting click-throughs, but there’s still right ways to do things and wrong ways to do things. Let’s go through some now:

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Don’t
Post a link with no explanation of what it is
Post boring things that happen in your day that even your closest friends don’t care about
Merely retweet what everyone else says. RT-ing is important, but it can’t be all you do.

Do
Be original
Show off your personality
Use mysterious or controversal intros to your links
Be relevant. Use hashtags and follow trending topics

Be Original
There are so many different things you can do with Twitter! Invent something new, see what inovators are doing, or look through this brainstormed list and see what works for you.

• Give followers a glimpse into the writing process, or the publishing process. You’re listening to Brahms as you write chapter 3 but to Radiohead as you write chapter 4, and you’re beginning to wonder if it has an effect on the style. Or you just got the first proof of the book and it looks gorgeous!
• Hold a competition: The first person to tell you why they love romance novels in 140 characters or less will get a character named after them. Or the first three people to RT this message will get an autographed book. Or put RT-ers into a drawing and once you get to 500 followers, pull a name and they’ll win a prize.
• Ask questions. What are people’s favorite book blogs? Who’s their favorite author and why? Start conversations. Ask for opinions. Ask for advice.
• Tell a joke. This here is my favorite joke telling Twitterer.
• Ask trivia questions.
• Link to specific features on your blog, website, interviews with you, excerpts from your work, etc.
• Use yFrog or Twitpic to post photos. It doesn’t have to be of you. Is there a stack of author copies fresh from the printer in your living room? Is there a bookstore full of people waiting for you to sign their books? Take a picture!
• Be creative!

Be Mysterious and Controversial
Make this a goal: get people to click on your links. If you’re using a URL shrinker that tracks your click-throughs, like Hootsuite, you’ll be able to tell if it’s working. Which of these will get more click throughs?

Family arrested for fraud after lying about their grandfather being the oldest man in Tokyo.   OR
Japanese mummy receives $109,000 in widowers pension.

They both lead to the same article, but one tells you enough so you don’t really need to read on, while the other makes you go “What is this? I have to click on this to find out what’s going on.” Think like a headline writer.

Be relevant
The front page of Twitter will always tell you what’s trending now. There are also various free tools to help you track the trends. Anything you see that applies to your work, make a mention of it. Don’t forget to use a hashtag to help people follow you. For example, if the hot topic of the day seems to be the hurricane, you would include #hurricane somewhere in your tweet about the hurricane. When people search for #hurricane, they will get all the tweets that have included #hurricane in them. It’s a nifty way to get noticed.

You can also use hashtags to get involved in chats. Sometimes people will schedule a live chat or interview on Twitter. Everyone who wants to participate just has to do a Twitter search for that hashtag and make sure they use that hashtag in all their posts. For example, there is a weekly #musicedchat hashtag chat. You’d search for #musicedchat on Twitter and then participate live by writing your responses in your What’s Happening box up top.

Useful Links
151 Ways to Tweet (Book Market)
Twitter 101 (eHow)
14 Cool Things People Do On Twitter (Penn Olson)
What Motivates People to Participate in Social Media? (Ami’s Space)

Using Twitter Time Efficiently

Social media is important to your career as a writer, but it doesn’t have to rule your life! Time and time again, I hear complaints about how people don’t want to join Twitter because they’ve heard that it takes up so much time. It depends how you use it. It doesn’t rule you–you rule it. So let’s talk budgeting your time.

Before you start, decide how much time you want to spend per day or per week on Twitter. Maybe you want to do 15 minutes per day, maybe an hour per week. You can always adjust your budget later on. Let’s talk about what you can do to use this time most efficiently.

Sign up for a free service that allows you to use Twitter and monitor your progress at the same time. I like http://hootsuite.com because of the owl. No, really, though, it’s a powerful tool that allows you to post your tweets; schedule tweets for the future; manage multiple accounts at the same time; read tweets based on who you follow, search words, twitter lists, and more. It also allows you to shrink URLs, which then allows you to see how many people have clicked on each of your links. It takes this data and breaks it into graphs for you based on location as well.

Break up your time as follows:
1. Post original material
2. Interact
3. Monitor

1. Post original material
Make it personal (show off your personality), make it interactive, make it fun, make it relevant (nobody wants to know what kind of cereal you had for breakfast). Write about the writing process. Are you having trouble with character development? Did you just turn in your manuscript? Is the publisher trying to change your title? Did the book just go to press? Is it on sale today? Let us know! Also include links to reviews, interviews, and free stuff. Don’t forget to link back to your website or blog frequently. I’ll post more about Twitter content in another post.

2. Interact
Read what other people are writing. Re-tweet the stuff you like and things you think your readers will be interested in too. The original tweeter will see that you retweeted and may return the favor.

See what other people are talking about. Follow the people who are in your genre, other writers, people in the writing industry, people involved with the concept of your book. Start conversations with them. They might introduce you to other influential tweeters.

FollowFriday is a meme that’s debatable as far as impact goes. It’s a polite way of saying that you like someone’s tweets and think others should follow them. They will often FF you back. You do this on Fridays by writing “#ff# and then listing people’s screen names with the @ symbol in front of each one.

Do searches for topics that you’re interested in now, either with or without the hash tag. You can run these searches right from the front page of Twitter. If your favorite Barnes and Noble is closing and you want to see who is talking about it, search “Barnes and Noble,” “B&N,” “#BN,” etc. and start talking with people about it.

3. Monitor
Real quick, before you sign off for the day, click the owl in the upper left. Choose Stats and Summary. It will tell you how many clicks you’ve gotten each day of the week. You can also view which links are getting the clicks. This will help you become better at writing intriguing links.

Facebook Mark-up Language (FBML) 101

Facebook Mark-up Language (FBML) is basically HTML coding with a few differences. But don’t let that scare you off! There are five simple codes to know to make your Facebook fanpage look great. You can memorize them or just copy-paste them into a document to refer back to whenever you need it.

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Where do I use FBML?
When you create a Facebook fanpage, you can create all the tabs you want–a welcome page, a page of book reviews, photo spreads, links to interviews, excerpts, video channels, special offers, etc. The easiest way to make these pages look appealing is through a few useful codes.

How do I add these tabs?
On your fan page, go to “edit page” under your icon. At the bottom under the Browse Applications heading, it will suggest FBML (a little gray box with < > symbols). Click on this. Then under the icon on the FBML page, click “add to page” and select your fanpage. Now go back to your fanpage, click “edit page” again. This time, you will have a FBML box. If you click “edit” in that box, you will be able to change the title of that tab and fill in content.

5 Codes

1. Line Break
Anywhere you want a line break, just type <BR>
For two line breaks, type it twice, and so on.

2. Bold
Anytime you want to emphasize text by bolding it, use <strong> and </strong> surrounding the words. For example, if you want the “stay tuned” words to be bold in this sentence: “Welcome and stay tuned for more upcoming events,” you would type this:

Welcome and <strong> stay tuned </strong> for more upcoming events.

The <strong> is the beginning of the bold, and the </strong> ends it.

3. Links
Let’s say you want to say “Visit my YouTube account!” but you want people to be able to click on the word “YouTube” and be taken to your YouTube page, which is www.youtube.com/no1getzs0da. You would type this:

Visit my <a href=”www.youtube.com/no1getzs0da”> YouTube </a> account!

The a starts the link. The href= tells where the link will go. The /a ends the link. Anything in between will be clickable (in this case, the word “YouTube”).

4. Adding a photo
I am going to use tinypic.com as an example, but you can use any photo hosting site you would like.

Step 1: Go to tinypic.com and create an account. It’s worth it and they don’t spam you.
Step 2: Upload your photo from your hard drive by clicking “browse,” selecting your photo, clicking “upload,” and confirming that you are not a robot by entering in their random letters if they prompt you to (might not happen).
Step 3: There are four boxes of code under the heading “Grab Your Code.” You only need the first and last. Copy-paste the first code into your Facebook FBML box. It will look something like this (except the red part will be different):

<a href=”http://tinypic.com?ref=73jmeh” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i35.tinypic.com/73jmeh.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Image and video hosting by TinyPic”>

Now copy the fourth code on the tinypic page. It will look like this (except the red part will be different):

http://i35.tinypic.com/73jmeh.jpg

Now, replace the blue part of the first code with the fourth code you just copied.

<a href=”http://tinypic.com?ref=73jmeh” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i35.tinypic.com/73jmeh.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Image and video hosting by TinyPic”>

And change the words Image and video hosting by TinyPic to be a short description of your picture, like Me on a farm. After you’ve saved your FBML box and returned to the fanpage and gone to that tab, you should see your photo there. Try clicking on it and see what happens.

5. Adding Video
Find the video you want on YouTube (or upload one on YouTube from your hard drive). If you click on the SHARE button under the video, you will get a little box of code. It will look like this (except the red part will be different):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2NFYxMFWQo

Copy the string of letters at the end (the red part) in the code you got off YouTube.
Now type this code into your FBML box:

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”
swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/ABCDEFG‘
imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/ABCDEFG/2.jpg’ width=’340′ height=’270′ />

Except, instead of ABCDEFG, paste in the string of letters you copied off YouTube. That’s all there is to it! Now when you save your FBML page and visit your fanpage, you should see your video.