youtube

Was thinking about Halloween and ended up taping this story.

Trying to set up an online presence for your group or organization? Here’s some basics to think about.

One: Include a blog on your website that has new content on a regular basis.

This first step is key to a better social media presence, because it influences your search engine rankings. Better search engine rankings draw more traffic to your site, as do good keywords, and if your blog features information about the group, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have the appropriate keywords.

Establish realistic criteria for “regular”: daily? weekly? biweekly? What can you actually expect to do?

Figure out how you will generate such content. Some suggestions:

• Group member announcements, interviews, and guest posts.
• Group events and news.
• Posts drawing on other social media, such as announcements of new videos on the Youtube channel (see point 4) or Pinterest boards (see point 5).
• Calls for volunteer positions and interviews with volunteers.
• Yearly best-of lists or review columns.

This blog should drive the group’s presence on social networks. Posts should automatically propagate to other networks, thereby relieving the pressure for someone to be managing and posting to individual streams, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as presenting a more unified and consistent approach.

Last week I talked about how blogging on Youtube can benefit writers, so I wanted to cover some of the Youtube basics necessary for a writer who wants to learn how to use it for self promotion. If you’re already technically savvy, much of this post will already be obvious to you, but the thinking about researching what others in the field are doing that’s mentioned at the end would still be a good practice.

First off, create a YouTube account. When picking your username, try to find something close to the one you use on your website. I use catrambo, which is the same username I use on Facebook, Twitter, and most other social networking sites. You want a name that your watchers can connect with your books, so they can find them later on.