Navid Moazzez of The Lifestyle Architects interviews Elizabeth Bradley on How to Build a Thriving Social Media Platform.
Elizabeth Bradley is British American freelance writer, photographer, and social media strategist currently living in Thailand.
Key tip: If you’re not going to be active or engaged on a social media platform, you shouldn’t be there.
Key tip: Be consistent with the quality and quantity of content you share via social media or your blog. That’s what builds a loyal tribe.
Before engaging in a lot of social media, ask yourself these questions:
1. What are your brand values? You need to know what you are trying to convey before you can communicate clearly.
2. What colors do you use on your blog, website, or logo? Make sure your social media look and feel matches your branding.
3. Who is your ideal customer or client? Defining this will help you target them more effectively.
4. Where is your ideal customer or client spending their time while online? That’s where you want to be online.
5. What social media platforms are they engaging with you? Those are the social media platforms you want to focus on.
6. Which social media platform do you enjoy using, and why? If you don’t enjoy a social media platform, get off it. Delete your profile. Don’t waste your time. Or, better yet, work with it long enough that you get to enjoy that platform. It’s amazing how much more fun any platform is if you are getting engagement, likes, repins, retweets, etc.
7. How often do you post on your social media accounts? I suggest 2 to 3 times a day. At a minimum, you should post to each social media account at least 2 to 3 times per week.
8. What hashtags do you use? For some hashtag ideas for book authors and ebook writers, see Social Media Hashtags for Book Authors.
9. Write down 5-10 leaders in your niche who are doing well on social media. Analyze their strategy and figure out how you can do it differently (do it your way!). You don’t want to copy here, you want to learn what’s working for them and apply it to what you do well.
10. Who is following the leaders in your niche? How can you interact with those followers? And how can you actually build a relationship with those leaders?
About John Kremer
John Kremer is author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, the Relationships Matter Marketing program, and many other books and reports on book marketing, Internet marketing, social media, and book publicity. -- John Kremer on Book Marketing.