Social Media Week: Quick tricks to boost your online profile

Wrapping up this week’s social media and blogging advice, here are some quick and easy things that you can do today to improve your online profile as a writer. I hope they help!

Start using images in your posts, even your Tweets! 

You might not be on Pinterest, but an awful lot of people are; having an image in your post means that it’s Pinnable, and you’ll get more reach. Also, as I’ve recently learnt, posts and Tweets with images are waaay more likely to be shared than those without!

Add links to your posts. 

If you’re talking about your ebook on the Amazon store, the latest chapter of your book, some exclusive content you posted… whatever it is, add a link to it! People will be way more likely to click through and look if they can click through instantly – but if they have to Google ‘Beth Reekles The Kissing Booth Guardian Interview’ or something, they might not bother. And if they do, there’s no certainty that they’ll even find the thing you’re talking about.

Where you’re adding links, make them hyperlinks, or shorten them. 

Hyperlinks are links embedded within the text. I know that Tumblr and Wordpress allow you to add those easily – and it makes your post look much neater. However, for things like Twitter and Facebook, where you can’t use hyperlinks, use shortened links. Like ow.ly, bit.do, goo.gl. There are plenty of free websites where you can shorten links – for example, I’ve made customised links using bit.do for my website, blog, and ask box. Again, makes the post neater, and saves you some characters!

Cross-promote your networks and platforms. 

Are you on Twitter? Great! Are you on Blogger? Fab. And you have a Facebook page? Brilliant! But if none of them are linked up, it’s harder for people to find you. There are plenty of free html widgets you can add to your blogs online, and many sites offer the option for you to add your other platforms to your profile. I know on Twitter you only get one url to add beneath your bio, so use it wisely. Link up your profiles, and get maximum reach.

And on that note – get familiar with If This, Then That! 

If you saw my post on My Blogging Essentials, you’ll know that I mentioned If This, Then That already, but I wanted to mention it here, too. Because it’s another free, super-easy online tool that will make your social networking life super-efficient. IFTTT allows you to link up your different profiles. 

For instance, I’ve set up my Instagram photos tagged #summerreadinglist to post straight to my ‘books!’ board on Pinterest; and every Writing Wednesday post on Tumblr re-created itself as a post on Wordpress. 

You don’t have to do anything complicated; it could be as simple as setting up every Facebook post you make to post on your blog, or every photo you blog to be uploaded to your Twitter account. Easy-peasy – and, it means you can spend minimal time re-posting your own content across different platforms.

If you’ve got a blog, don’t forget about old content. 

You know that great post you wrote on writers’ block a few months ago? Well, you don’t have to reblog it every week, but maybe when you write a new post to do with writing, you could link back to it. Got a new book coming out? Maybe link to an old post of when your last book came out to be nostalgic! 

Another example of how I’m doing it: every Writing Wednesday post has a link to go right back to the very first Writing Wednesday post (so the reader can effectively start them from the beginning) and also links to the next week’s post. I also add links to Writing Wednesday posts on similar topics. 

It took me a while to do this recently, going through all fifty-odd posts in one afternoon, but if you do it as you go along, it shouldn’t take up too much time!

Follow other writers online.

Interacting with people is a great way to build your audience, as I mentioned in some posts earlier this week. But that’s not the whole point of this. Find writer blogs, Twitter account, Instagram and Facebook pages… Follow them. Take a look at their content. What sort of things are they posting about? Maybe they post things you’d like to share on your own accounts via reblogs (or whatever), or maybe it’ll inspire you to write similar posts for your own blog.

Try a guest post!

Some bloggers are happy to feature ‘guest posts’ by other people in their niche (like me!) if you only ask them about it. If they’re a book review blog or a fellow writer’s blog, then you won’t lose anything by either asking if they’d be willing to let you do a guest post, or even asking them to write a post for your blog. 

But I would recommend that you check out if they’ve done guest posts already – maybe they have, and they do lots of author interviews, so you could suggest doing one of those with them. It’ll grow your audience, and like I said: you don’t have anything to lose.

Hopefully, those tips will help you - and they’re all things you can do within ten minutes, right now. Have you got any of your own tips to share? Drop them in the comments below!