Waste Less Time On Social Media With This One Little Trick

I’m going to take a shot in the dark and assume that you’re part of the 88.5% of authors who are working a second job. If you’re not, it is highly likely you have family commitments to steal your time.

You’re busy. This isn’t a 9-5 job. You live in a world where you feel guilty for eating, because it takes time away from your writing. In order to maintain a consistent workflow (and your sanity) it is fundamentally important to establish a routine. Having a routine enables you to create a clear divide between yourself and your author-self. It also helps you to work at maximum efficiency.

A problem writers often face when trying to maintain their routines, is when another element is suddenly thrown into the equation. For example, getting published can provide you with motivation and kick-start you to write a second novel. But this is where it all gets tricky. You now need to add time for book promotion into your routine.

So how do you juggle promoting your published novel via social media without sacrificing work on your new novel? Well, you could start scheduling your social media posts in advance. This would free you up to spend more time writing.

Introducing Social for Publishers

Luckily, in today’s world there are hundreds of tools at your service, which help authors like yourselves manage your time better. When it comes to scheduling posts on social networks, there is a very useful tool which we developed, called Social for Publishers.

What is Social for Publishers?

Social for Publishers is a dashboard that connects to your various social media accounts. The main feature of this dashboard is the ability to schedule tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn posts to be published at specific times. Meaning you can write all of your posts in one go, then sit back and relax as The dashboard publishes them throughout the week.

Schedule regular social media posts

Establishing a loyal online following requires commitment. If you aren’t posting regularly, you put yourself at risk of losing followers. With Social for Publishers you can automate your posts so that it appears that you are actively using social media, even when you’re too busy to do so.

Once you’ve signed up for your free account on the Social for Publishers website, select the Scheduler Tab.

 

 

As you can see, you can set your posts to be scheduled on any day in the future and at any time. You can edit this schedule anytime you want, adding or taking away posts to suit your needs.

Consistency in posting on social media is key

Social for Publishers has a lot of additional features, making it one of my preferred social media scheduling tools. Amongst them, is how easy it is to scan through all of your posts before any get published. This allows you to check to see if there is variation in your posts, how often you are posting and whether every post is consistent to your style and the way you want to portray yourself and your work.

Below is an image of what the list looks like, to find this just select the content tab at the top of the page.

 

From this list it is very easy to edit and delete any of your posts. Giving you full quality control of your promotional posts.

Another way that Social for Publishers helps to maintain a consistent image is it’s multi-network sharing. When you sign up you can connect to a variety of different social networks using any account you like. When you share a post, you simply click off the networks you don’t want to send to.

 

On the above image, the post would only send to my Twitter and Facebook accounts, as we can see that I have turned off posting for LinkedIn.

The multi-network feature means that you can send the same post across all of your social sites, without having to re-type it every time. This both helps maintain a consistent image, and saves you a lot of time!

Eradicate distraction

Having two tasks to do can create a lot of guilt, and with guilt comes distraction. You begin writing your book, but in the back of your mind there is a pressing guilt that you need to promote your previous one. So you put aside your writing and open up social media, where you no doubt end up procrastinating for longer than you should.

With pre-arranged promotional posts, you can turn off social media completely and give your full attention to your new novel, or other parts of your writing routine. Setting aside a specific time to plan your social media promotions, means they don’t interrupt time that you have set aside to do other things.

It also takes away the guilt.

Keep calm and tweet on

Without automated posts, you have to dream up the perfect social media update on the spot. No doubt, the moment goes something along the lines of “I haven’t tweeted in a while, I should tweet. I don’t know what to tweet, I’ll just post a link to my book. Okay, done.” Or maybe it will install a frenzy of panic as you try and come up with the most intriguing, interesting, provocative post imaginable and in your blurred moment of panic, you tweet a photo of a cat with reading glasses on.

Automated social media posts eliminate the need for panic. You can sit down and give yourself a couple of hours to think calmly about all the topics you want to cover within the week or month. This works best if you sit down and first answer the following questions:

• How many times per week do I want to directly promote or talk about my published novel?
• How often can I repeat the same tweet?
• How often do I talk about my current work?
• How often do I mention my personal life? (interesting things you have done/ inspiring things/ funny stories)

Once you begin to see your posts as a group, rather than individual posts, you can better manage the way that you appear to your followers.

You still need to interact with readers across your social media platform

All of this automation doesn’t mean you never have to interact with any of your readers again. You should only use tools such as Social for Publishers to maintain a constant stream of evergreen content. You will still need to schedule in some time either every day, or at the very least once a week, to respond to people personally.

Automated content is great for maintaining a consistent presence on social media, but without the personal interaction it means nothing.

Keep your eyes open

The only criticism I would have for social media schedulers is that, despite them sending your tweets out automatically, you have to remain very aware of what is happening in the world and be prepared to pause your posts at any moment. For example, if something happens on a national or even global scale, everyone on the internet will be commenting on it. If you then send out a tweet about the book you’re working on, this could appear ignorant or disrespectful (or at the very least go unnoticed).

Waste Less Time On Social Media With This One Little TrickClick To Tweet

Having said that, as long as you make sure you pause your tweets when a meteor comes towards earth; Social for Publishers will greatly enhance your social media experience and could increase your efficiency when it comes to your work. Best of all, it’s free to set up an account, so there’s no reason to not try it out.

Do you use a social media scheduler and what sort of content do you like to schedule in advance? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.