8 Social Media Lessons From the Trenches

In my last post, I shared how I got my feet wet in building word of mouth and social marketing for a new book written by friend Lauren Kessler called My Teenage Werewolf, where she embeds in the life of an average American middle schooler—her daughter Lizzie. It’s “hilarious and insightful’ according to several reviewers, including me.).

Continuing my social media lessons from the trenches:

5. Tweet like a fiend.
Lauren and I developed a list of things for her to tweet about, including:

• New blog posts on her site promoting her blog
• New information about teen girls and their development
• Announcements on book readings and signing
• Links to reviews
• Personal insights from Lauren

Armed with that list, Lauren got comfortable tweeting on a regular basis and building her list of followers. I also got into the picture, retweeting her tweets and making sure the hashtags were those being used by other book lovers.

What we found is the more often you tweet, the more people will follow you. And building a following on Twitter is a great step to starting a good word of mouth campaign.

6. Use reviews.
You may have read that people trust others more than ads or company blogs when making decisions. We found this to be very, very true.  Once the reviews started coming out about Lauren’s book, we started including quotes in Facebook updates and tweets.

We also used hashtags with the name of the review site (such as #LHJ and #WETA) to pull the tweets up in searches for those media vehicles. We’ve received a lot of positive reaction to posts including the review information. Given the number of review sites out there now, it is easy to quote reviews in your word of mouth and social media campaign.

7. Try Facebook ads.
You can get incredibly targeted with Facebook ads and receive a large number of impressions on a small budget. We created an ad that included the LHJ quote and directed it to fans of LHJ, we created an ad specifically for women who like Oprah and Rachel  Ray, (Lauren has published articles in Oprah’s magazine).

These targeted ads pulled better than the ads directed to more general audiences, such as women interested in parenting.  Taking a few moments to research different social interests in Facebook can lead you to a strong performing campaign.

8. Interact.
Lauren committed to responding to every Facebook post, tweet, and blog.

Comment. Now, you might think this would come naturally to a writer, but you’d be wrong. Her involvement set her apart from other authors, gave her more of a personality, and those connections, I think, inspired sales. So many businesses are still thinking one-way messaging. They need to change that.

As I write this, Lauren’s book is working its way up the Amazon best seller list and more and more positive reviews are coming in. She is receiving feedback and requests from new places, and most importantly, she is thrilled and sees that her personal social media efforts are paying off.

Finally, I am very lucky to have an open-minded client (and one willing to make the time commitment to this project), which is another key to success, and maybe the biggest one of all.

– Kim