You want to write – not tweet or post.
But it’s the rare writer these days who can shun social media and still sell
books. The solution: learn from a master, and maximize the time you’ve allotted
for social media exchanges. If you’re like me, you won’t ever have 1.2 million
Twitter followers, check your RSS feed in the middle of the night, or have the
scratch to contract out portions of your social media presence. But you’ll
still find plenty of tips in this post to make the promotion part of your
writing life easier and more efficient. This post is reprinted from Hubspot
by permission of Guy Kawasaki.
Many people ask
me how I manage my social media accounts (and others make stuff up rather than
figure out what I do). Here are the gory, inside-story details of what I
do. 
Perhaps you may find some
of my methods useful to help you get the most out of social media, too.
Perhaps you may find some
of my methods useful to help you get the most out of social media, too.
Twitter
On Twitter,
I'm @GuyKawasaki. My
Twitter practices defy the recommendations of social media
"schmexperts" (schmuck + experts) to manually post a limited number
of tweets and not use automation, repetition, contributors, and ghostwriters.
I have never
been on the Twitter Suggested User List, and I have more than 1.2 million
followers. I attribute this success to providing a lot of interesting links
that people retweet. These retweets expose me to many people who then follow
me. There are five (yes, five -- count 'em) sources that feed my Twitter account:
1) HolyKaw
I co-founded a
website called Alltop. Half of it is an aggregation of 30,000 RSS feeds
organized into 1,500 topics ranging from adoption to zoology. The other half is
a website called HolyKaw.
HolyKaw provides
a continuous flow of interesting and diverse stories that should elicit the
response, “Holy cow!” (Holycow.com was taken but since my name is pronounced
“Cow-asaki,” I figured that HolyKaw would work.)
The posts on
HolyKaw are short summations of stories, a picture or video to illustrate the
story, and a link to the source. Approximately twenty people/organizations have
contributor-level access to HolyKaw.
We pay several
as editors -- they are not “interns” in the sense of unpaid students. Organizations
such as Futurity and National Geographic also have contributor-level access
because they consistently post great stories.
The headline of
a HolyKaw post -- for example, “Compilation
of stories about introverts, outsiders, and loners” -- automatically
generates tweets that go out through a custom app called GRATE, for “Guy’s
Repeating Automated Tweet Engine." These slightly modified tweets appear
four times, eight hours apart.
The reason for
repeated tweets is to maximize traffic and therefore advertising
sales. I’ve found that each tweet gets approximately the same amount of
clickthroughs. Why get 600 page views when you can get 2,400? Like CNN, ESPN,
and NPR, we provide content repeatedly because people live in different time
zones and have different social media habits.
2) Repurposed
Google+ Posts
Three other
people also post to HolyKaw via Google+: Peg Fitzpatrick, Trey Ratcliff, and me. (I explain
this in the Google+ section below.)
3) Repurposed
Facebook.com Posts
Peg Fitzpatrick
manages the Facebook.com/guysco brand
page. When she posts stories there, they automatically appear as tweets.
4) My Comments
and Responses
I use Tweetdeck to respond to @-mentions of
@Guykawasaki, as well as to direct messages. If you see a response tweet, it is
always me--never anyone else.
5) Promotional
Tweets
Finally, if you
see a tweet that is promoting my books, appearances, or investments, it’s
almost always one that I posted with Tweetdeck or that Peg Fitzpatrick has
scheduled using HootSuite.
Google+
On Google+,
I'm GuyKawasaki, and Google+
is the core of my social media existence. It is the Macintosh of social media:
better, used by fewer people, and often condemned by the experts. Unlike other
social media profiles I own, no one else ever posts, responds, or comments on
Google+ as me.
My orientation toward
Google+ (and social media in general) is what I call the NPR Model. My role is
to curate good stories that entertain, enlighten, and inspire people 365 days a
year. My goal is to earn the right to promote my books, companies, or causes to
them just as NPR earns the right to run fundraising telethons from time to
time.
My posts range
from first-person accounts of being a
black tourist in China, what
happened to Allen Iverson after his NBA career, and gifts
from Air New Zealand. I use five primary resources to find stories to post:
This is a custom
compilation of the RSS feeds of websites such as In Focus, The Big Picture,
YouTube, and NPR that are mother lodes of great content. This is my one-stop
shopping cart for content.
2) HolyKaw
Yes, I post what
my contributors post as me (i.e. under my name) because the HolyKaw contributors
are often better at being me than me. Wrap your mind around that.
3) What’s Hot Feed of Google+
Think of this as
crowdsourced story leads. The beauty of this feed is that you know that people
have already judged the stories as good, though it tends to be heavy on Android
news and inspirational quotations.
4) Most Popular
Stories
When I’m
checking out stories from the first two sources, I look at the “Most Emailed”
and “Most Popular” listings on the right side of most websites. These often
yield great material. I’ve also compiled a collection of most emailed and most
popular feeds at Most-Popular.alltop to
make this even easier for you.
5) Pointers From
Various Friends and Family
Many people know
that I’m on the hunt for good content, so they send me leads. These are almost
always good enough to post.
Some of my
Google+ posts pass the “holy cow!” test, and there is a plug-in to publish
Google+ posts to a WordPress blog. This means I can cherry pick my Google+
posts for HolyKaw. (Look for the hashtag “HolyKaw” to see which will appear in
HolyKaw and later Twitter.)
Peg Fitzpatrick,
Trey Ratcliff, and I use this method to select some of their Google+ posts for
inclusion in HolyKaw. They do this to gain additional exposure since these
posts are tweeted to my 1.2 million Twitter followers four times eight hours
apart through the HolyKaw GRATE machine.
Three Google+ Power Tips
I adore Google+,
so let me provide these power tips for using the service:
1) Find anytime,
but post when you’re cogent.
I often get up
in the middle of the night and check Alltop and the Google+ What’s Hot feed on
my Nexus 7. When I find something good, I share it to a Google+ private
community with only one member: me. When I wake up in the morning, I go to this
community to see what stories I found in a less cogent condition and write up a
post.
2) Schedule
Google+ posts.
There are
multiple ways to schedule Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest posts
using various tools. However, Google+ makes it harder than those services.
There are two ways to do this, however. First, there’s Do
Share, a Chrome extension. Second, if you have a HootSuite enterprise
account, you can schedule to a Google+ Business Page (as opposed to a personal
profile). Since my Google+ focus is on my personal profile, I don't use the
HootSuite method.
3) Get rid of
trolls.
Be a hard-ass:
Get rid of people who irritate you. Think of your Google+ posts as your
swimming pool. If people pee in it, throw them out. There are some people you
need to get out of your social media life. A Chrome extension called Nuke
Comments is a lovely solution because it enables you to delete a
comment, block the person, and report him/her with one click.
Facebook
I have two
personas on Facebook: Facebook.com/guy and Facebook.com/guysco. The first
is a personal profile, and the second is a brand page. I operate them
differently.
First, a virtual
assistant monitors my Google+ account and manually adds most of my Google+
posts to Facebook.com/guy using Buffer.
(Disclosure: I advise Buffer.)
There are
plugins that can automatically publish Google+ posts to Facebook. However,
every Google+ post is not appropriate for Facebook, and there’s no way for me
to tag the ones that are appropriate. Thus, a human has to make the decision,
download the photo or YouTube embed link, make minor edits such as removing the
“+” in Google+ +mentions, and post to Facebook.
I monitor
comments at Facebook.com/guy and respond to them as much as time permits. My
virtual assistant never acts as me, so either I answer or there is no response
at all.
Second, for
Facebook.com/guysco, Peg Fitzpatrick, whom I mentioned earlier, makes all the
posts to this page, and these stories automatically become tweets. This
Facebook Page is a branding effort for “Guy’s companies,” which are primarily
my books.
LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, I
am Guy Kawasaki. The virtual assistant who takes my Google+ posts and publishes
them to Facebook uses the same process for LinkedIn using Buffer. One of the
cool things about Buffer is that you can post to Facebook and LinkedIn at the
same time, so this is easy.
There are seldom
comments on my LinkedIn posts, so I seldom visit my posts to respond -- of
course, this may be a self-fulfilling process. But I have to draw the line
somewhere, or I’ll never play hockey during the day, which is a key component
of my happiness.
Pinterest
On Pinterest, I'm
Guy Kawasaki, but Peg
Fitzpatrick manages my Pinterest presence. There are two reasons: First, I
don’t have enough time to do a good job with more than three services (my
priority, in order, is Google+, then Twitter, then Facebook).
Second, I don’t
have Peg’s magic sauce to manage Pinterest as well as the Pinterest community
deserves. Part of doing social media well is knowing what you don’t know and
what you can’t do well, and then finding someone who does.
Conclusion
Don’t get the
impression that there is a huge team of people doing what I described above.
The total of all resources, excluding my own activities, is approximately one
full-time equivalent. In addition, I spend three to four hours per day creating
my own posts and commenting and responding.
To summarize,
here’s quick wrap-up to review my social media methods:
Twitter: Mostly
generated from the headlines of HolyKaw stories, four times, eight hours apart;
contributions via Google+ and Facebook; and manual promotional tweets.
Google+: Me
only. Think of me as the Mike Rowe of Google+ -- I'm willing to do the
"dirty jobs."
Pinterest: Peg
Fitzpatrick acting as me.
Facebook and
LinkedIn: Virtual assistant reposting some of my Google+ posts.
Again, no one
responds as me (for better or worse, as I've sometimes learned) on social
media, though many different people may be behind a post.
This is how I
manage my social media presence as of May 2013. I hope there are techniques
here that you can use. Stay tuned, because my procedures are ever-changing.
This post first appeared in Hubspot
on May 13, 2013. Guy Kawasaki is a special advisor to the Motorola business unit
of Google. He is also the author of APE, What the Plus!, Enchantment, and nine
other books. Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple. Kawasaki Stanford
University Babson
College
