Writer Beware®: The Blog. Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware. This week I've got another great guest post for you, from marketing expert Chris Syme. We writers have all heard that we "have" to be on social media, which is presented to us- -both by experts and the not- so- expert- -as the Holy Grail of marketing and self- promotion. But apart from the thorny questions of which platforms to use (Twitter? Facebook? Pinterest? Some of them? All of them?), and how to use them (How often should we post? What's the proper mix of friendly interaction and self- promotion?), there's the problem of "services" that want to exploit our confusion to rip us off. Read on for solid advice on how to separate the worthwhile from the worthless, and warnings about some common social media scams. Social Media Snake Oil Comes In All Shapes And Sizesby Chris Syme. Authors want to sell books. But most indie authors know very little about how to promote their books. And when it comes to social media, authors everywhere are throwing up their hands. Is it a waste of time? Do I need to be on Twitter? How often should I post on Facebook? I get email from authors who are frustrated. They see social media as a minefield and don’t want to step in for fear they will never come out. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is just buy that package of hundreds of tweets for twenty dollars and cross your fingers hoping that somebody will buy your book. After all, everybody says you have to be on Twitter, right? We hear words like platform, brand, discoverability. How can an author break through the firehose of noise on the Internet and decide what, if anything, to do? Writer Game Industry JobsSeparate The Wheat From The Chaff. My husband is a grain farmer. Every year we pull out the massive combine and dust it off, getting ready for the magic of harvest. Gone are the days when workers had to beat the grain shocks by hand to separate the wheat from the chaff. ![]() These days, those big expensive machines cut the wheat and feed it through a mechanism that separates the grain from its stalk The stalks are chewed up into chaff and spewed out the back of the combine to be absorbed back into the soil. In marketing, we need to do the same. We have to learn how to separate the snake oil from the good stuff. Authors should want to learn how to spot a worthless marketing scheme. But there’s a learning curve. And sometimes that Facebook ad that worked for your friend isn’t going to work for you. This is where education comes in. The book marketing sector, more than any I have ever worked in, is full of bad marketing advice. My objective here is to help you separate the wheat from the chaff - - to be able to spot snake oil when you see it. It’s The Principle Of The Thing. Every business sector has best practices. It’s possible to circumvent those and get a modicum of success, but that is an anomaly. Social media marketing has basic principles of success. They aren’t rocket science, they are based on data. Take this example on hashtags. In early 2. 01. 4, Dan Zarella, a social media data researcher for Hub. Spot, found that if hashtags are used in a tweet (# - - a pound sign - - followed by a phrase of reference that is followed by many people), that tweet is 5. His results were based on mining data from over one million tweets. So, people jumped on the hashtag band wagon. The more, the better, or so people thought. In 2. 01. 4 Buffer, another reliable social media research company, published data that showed that after two hashtags, engagement of a post actually goes down (graphic courtesy of Buffer). This is a principle that most savvy marketers take for granted now. But there are some unethical snake oil salespeople out there telling authors that the more hashtags the merrier. They didn’t get the memo on too many hashtags tanking engagement. On Biography.com, get the scoop on Stan Lee, the comic-book creator who came up with the likes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. GET INFORMED. Industry information at your fingertips. GET CONNECTED. Over 200,000 Hollywood insiders. GET DISCOVERED. Enhance your IMDb Page. Go to IMDbPro ». And, for a mere $1. Here is a sample ad. Not a day goes by that I don’t see this scam retweeted by several authors, maybe because they promised to help promote the service for more free tweets that will “reach millions of people generating a truly astonishing amount of traffic.” All these hashtag- laden tweets do is annoy people. To the savvy social media user, they reek of stupidity. The outlier may sell a few books, but I wonder how many more books that person could have sold if they had used their money wisely. Another popular Twitter scam offered by more than one company offers authors hundreds of thousands of followers worth of exposure for your tweet for a fee. I experimented with one of these snake oil outfits recently just to test it. ![]() I knew I was blowing my money, but it was a mere twenty bucks to prove my thesis. This company boasts three different Twitter accounts with 3. I want to add that it is fairly easy to amass Twitter followers if you know what you are doing. For instance, this particular company is supposedly followed by Le. Bron James, according to the report I ran on their followers on Simply Measured. But the real Le. Bron James only follows 1. So, on a whim I looked through them all. ![]() This company was not there. And, their fake Le. Bron James has only three million followers while the real King James has 2. This Le. Bron James page is a fake account built to fool people into following. It has been followed by millions of people who think it’s the real thing. These fake accounts automatically follow back so other unscrupulous people can amass large follower counts. It’s a well- known racket in marketing circles. Fake follower companies search diligently for these auto- following accounts to increase their fake reach. Did you notice I use the word fake a lot?) Also, an analysis of this company’s top 2. My $1. 9 produced zero sales and zero new Twitter followers. ![]() Maybe I should have spent more money. But alas, here’s a review of their service from an author who purchased five days worth of tweets. Also no sales. Scam artists know what they are doing. They are playing on peoples’ pain points and ignorance. They can build fake followings completely on accounts that follow back automatically. Keep in mind that all you need to start a Twitter account is an email address. It’s an ugly, dark business. There is no verification to make sure that real people are setting up accounts. These companies abound on the internet. Hint: if the website looks rinky- dink and boasts of millions of daily impressions from loyal fans, beware. We Will Promote Your Book…For A Price. There are more bad promotion sites out there than you can shake a stick at. How can you tell the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly? Many of them have slick websites, Facebook pages, and multiple Twitter feeds boasting of thousands, maybe millions of followers. Here are a couple pointers to help you make up your mind. Good sites: There are many sites out there that are based on good marketing principles and have a large audience of both authors and readers. They validate their expertise with blog pieces, authentic peer recommendations, podcasts, books they write, webinars, speaking engagements, and they can prove success by numbers over a long period of time. Not everyone in this category is spot on when it comes to social media strategy, but most are trying. The resource may be membership- gated such as Jim Kukral’s Author Marketing Club (I am a member), Where Writers Win, and others. ![]() They usually offer a subscription at a reasonable yearly price and offer a large variety of tools to help authors succeed. The large variety of marketing tools is a key. There are also many knowledgeable marketers that cater strictly to authors such as Penny Sansevieri’s Author Marketing Experts, Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer, and Book Marketing Tools. In the good category are also author forums like Writers Café (KBoards) and The Alliance Of Independent Authors (I am a member). Forums like these are populated by authors and are a good place to get recommendations and reviews for everything from editors to marketing services. There are also a number of authors out there that share their validated expertise with other authors through a combination of free resources and pay- per webinars and classes. Joanna Penn and Jane Friedman come to mind. Questionable sites (the bad and the ugly): It is impossible to list all the suspect author marketing services out there but I do write about them often on my agency’s blog for authors. These sites ask for money for their suspect services. There is no information on their “about” pages that validates their expertise or existence, just blabbing about the reach of their audience. They are not published authors or even legitimate marketing services. They are product- only. Beware of offers like this one from Contentmo. Besides the fact that their website design is a red flag, their claim that they have 2. There is no explanation or proof of who or where those impressions come from other than a list of their interconnected Twitter feeds and low- volume Facebook pages. Another red flag here is the absence of real people’s names in the About section of their site, a Gmail address as a contact, no address or location information, and their testimonials are suspect. I am also wondering why a company that brags 2. Facebook page. Many sites in this category have some free services. If you want to give them a try, keep track of your results. I recommend recording results with every marketing strategy you try. If they are free, give them more than one try so you can make sure your initials results were correct. Free is okay but you often get what you pay for…nothing. The world of social media marketing is a quagmire for many authors. If you’re just not sure what to do, I would recommend starting with self- education. I have a list of resources (mostly blogs) on my website that I personally recommend. The more educated you become, the easier it will be for you to spot snake oil when you see it. Chris Syme has over 2.
CKSyme Media Group.
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