In this sequel to my previous post on author branding mistakes new writers make on social media, I will enlighten you on the best practices to adopt when setting up your author brand on social media.
Before jumping in to set up your author brand on social media, there are a few things about social media author branding you should know about.
- Visibility: Your author's brand needs to be visually appealing. I'm talking colors, logos, fonts, format, style, website, and content.
- Originality: Your author's brand needs to be unique to you alone. I'm talking about content tone, voice, type of content, etc.
- Personality: Your author's brand needs to be an extension of who you are and what you do. It should convey things you believe in, what you are excited about, why you do what you do, your control message, and your branding theme.
- Connectivity: Your author's brand needs to have a focused target audience or a set of target audiences that you want to connect with.
- Strategy: This involves careful planning on how to project your brand the right way, reach your target audience, showcase your brand, spread your message, and establish yourself as an authority in your given niche or niches.
Read: Top 10 reasons why networking is important to grow your authors brand
Setting up your author brand on social media as a budding creative needn't become a deal breaker, where you begin to ponder and chew your nails on how to get it right or try your best to ensure perfection with your channel of choice when in truth all you have to do is to experiment as you go.
No one totally gets it right the first time, because as an author you keep learning, growing, and evolving until you've become confident and experienced which also reflects in your branding journey as you go. So, I advise you to take it one step at a time until you've found what works for you if you're building your author brand alone.
However, it is a different ball game if you decide to hire a social media author branding expert to do the work for you. Either way, the truth is you've decided to build your author's brand on social media and that is a bold step to take as a budding author.
Read: Grow your author brand through collaborations as an aspiring author
Another thing to understand before setting up your brand on social media is that social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and a host of others have patterns of content creation unique to them, and you should carefully evaluate them before jumping on of the social trains.
This is because you don't want to be caught hanging by a thread with your sanity on the line. Besides, why choose a platform that will demand more than you can give when there are others you can excel at?
Examples of some social media platforms are as follows:
- TikTok is heavy on video content creation
- Instagram has a blend of pictures, posts formats & video content creation
- Twitter is heavy on short, captivating post tweets or interesting post threads
- Facebook is heavy on picture and post formats, plus a splash of video content.
- LinkedIn is heavy on picture and post formats
- Pinterest is heavy on picture pins & idea pins
- Youtube is heavy on videos content creation
With this in mind, it becomes easier to pick and choose the platforms that resonate well with your author branding and go for a handful you can properly manage. I'll advise you to pick three for a start and grow from there.
The real question is, how do you set your author's brand on social media as a newbie writer/author? What do you need to do and how do you do it properly? Well, you're in luck because I have drafted 6 best practices to adopt when setting up your author brand on social media.
- Carry Out a Social Media Audit
One of the best things to do before setting up your brand on social media is to carry out a social media audit. This is simply a way for you to vet the platforms I listed above to determine which combinations will suit your brand the most.
As a newbie author, you must begin your author branding on platforms you can handle easily, platforms you understand well, and platforms that won't make you go crazy trying to keep up with trends.
As an author myself, I use Pinterest to highlight some of my books, short stories, and excerpts and share a link to my youtube channel. I use my Youtube channel to showcase my book trailers, book mail, video teasers, and vlog.
Although my major social media of focus is Twitter & Instagram. I use these two as a support system to push separate areas of my author's brand.
For my blog, I'm focusing my energy on Instagram for visibility, Youtube for long-form video content sharing, and Pinterest for reach.
With this, you can see how I have carefully positioned and set up my author brand on these social media platforms because it syncs well with my brand.
- Establish Your Content Pillars
Establishing your content pillars for your social media platforms is very important because you don't want to start building your author's brand without a clear message or theme in mind.
A useful tip is to carve out your content pillars from your brand's message. Whatever your brand stands for should form a major part of your content pillars on social media so you can align your brand's aspiration with your content on social media.
My author brand is centered around writing heartwarming, suspense-filled, steamy romance and erotic stories with heavy inference on friendship, family, and love because I believe with these three combos, life gets easier, more enjoyable, and more fun, despite what my characters will be dragged through.
For my blogging brand, I chose to center my content pillars around helping budding authors understand the writing process, the basics of writing, tips and hacks to help them grow as budding authors and preaching self-care.
Your content pillars will inform what your content format should look like and how best to pass your message across on your social platforms; so, take out time to think about your brand's central message, and draft your content pillars from there.
- Decide on Your Content Format
Deciding on what content format to choose is highly dependent on what type of content you want to distribute, your social media platform of choice, and your level of creative skill.
One of the best and easiest social media content creation tools out there is Canva. It has beautiful templates with premade designs you can edit and repurpose for your social media page.
The only downside so far is, that you have to manually create your own youtube videos because their templates for long-form videos are little. I'm guessing that the idea behind that is because Youtube is more of a face-time, video content creation platform.
This was a problem for me because I'm camera shy, but I eventually found other ways to create my youtube videos that are super easy and exciting too.
Youtube videos aside, Canva will help you create some beautiful, eye-catching, templates in whatever format you choose (videos, reels, tweets, carousels, single posts, infographics, picture posts, etc.)
Also, if you decide to go with a mix of formats, like reels, posts, carousels & videos for Instagram, you'll have to draw up a page content format for your post so it doesn't come off as tacky when you publish it without a sequence.
- Set Up Your Professional Author Profiles
One of the gravest mistakes you can make is setting up an author's brand without a professional profile. I mean no logo, photo, bio, link-in-bio, post, or portfolio. You are simply setting up your author brand for epic failure.
Ensure you have everything to make your profile stand out from your crowd, and ensure to make it uniform across your social trail. This will help your brand's visibility on social media and help it become easily recognizable and attributable to you.
- Set up a Social Media Schedule For Content Creation
Consistency is a key factor when setting up your author brand on social media. You cannot stick your neck out the first day and retreat into your shell the following day.
One of the best ways to help maintain consistency as a budding author/writer building a brand on social media is to set up a social media schedule.
Setting up a personal schedule helps you prepare a calendar of content ideas for a period and how you intend to share them on your social media platforms. This is super helpful for budding creatives because it gives you room to brainstorm content ideas, draft these ideas early on, and arrange them in an orderly fashion ready for posting.
You could draft an entire month's worth of content, and save it for scheduling on social media which saves you time and energy and frees you from the shackles of content creation burnout in the short run.
It will also save you the stress of always thinking about what to post.
- Plan and Schedule Your Posts
Lastly, one of the best practices you can adopt as a budding creative is planning and scheduling your weekly post on social media.
The fact that you have made a month's worth of content doesn't mean it will post itself. You have to draft a content plan for your page, have a visual board of how your content should appear on your social media pages, and plan accordingly.
You can also repurpose your content for better visibility, understanding, and engagement.
After planning your post patterns, formats, and style, you can schedule a week's work of social media posts using the following apps.
- Canva In-app scheduler
- Plannable
- Post Planner
Endnotes:
Adopting these best practices when setting up your author brand on social media will ensure a seamless and stress-free transition for you. Some of the mistakes new writers make on social media steam from a lack of awareness, fear, uncertainties, and doubts about their capabilities.
There is only one thing you should note. Building your author's brand will take a lot of time, effort, and consistency to get off the ground as a budding creative. It is not for you to give up on your first two or five tries. No, Building your brand should be done with long-term progress in mind.
Best of luck with your author brand, awesome creative.
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