Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Best Practices

Best practices differ from platform to platform. If you are only going to read one chapter of this book, read this one.

General Stuff

Don’t annoy people. Don’t spam. Don’t abandon your sites. If you think they’ll become too much, go small and grow; that’s a lot better than going big and shrinking. Follow the Rule of Thirds. Here’s a great post that can give you some specifics about creating great posts –

https://plus.google.com/115454411328749064160/posts/1E2KU7Q3q7o

Facebook

Only about 6% of your followers on a page will see your content – true story! So oversharing is probably not going to be an issue. Add an image to every single post. To that end, make sure you have some relatively generic images (I have one of a quill pen in an inkwell, for example) in case you’re really, really stumped when it comes to an image. Use the scheduler or Hoot Suite, and check your metrics. You can get Facebook metrics after you’ve gotten 30 or more likes (you can like your own page, which can count as one of those likes). Pay particular attention, after a few weeks, to when your followers are online, and post then, generally two or three times per week. Furthermore, don’t post more than about 200 – 250 words; otherwise, Facebook will open a new tab, and not everybody likes that.

Twitter

Tweet twice per day, generally in the morning and the early afternoon, just around or after lunchtime. Don’t add more than two or three hashtags, or a combination of hashtags plus link(s).  Any more than three things to click on and the post just looks bad. The only exception is for #FollowFriday (even then, gather up your #FF people thematically, e. g. #FF #Wattpad authors @__). If you can swing it, make sure one of the links is to an image (again, generic images are your friend if you’re really stumped). Write tweets that are no more than a total (including hashtags and links) of 80 – 100 characters. This gives people room to comment when they retweet. Schedule tweets in Hoot Suite.

Blogging

Blog two or three times per week, and follow your WordPress stats to see when people are online so as to determine when you should be blogging. Use WordPress’s scheduling features and set up a bunch of blogs when you’re feeling inspired. Always add at least one image, and try to interlink to your own or others’ content. Zemanta is a great app for this. Blog posts should be 250 – 500 words long on average, but they can be longer or shorter as circumstances dictate. However, you will have SEO issues if your blog posts are really short (less than 200 words). Tags should match content within the post, and the main tag should probably be the blog title itself, and then repeated as a title within the first paragraph in the body of the post. E. g. a blog post entitled Horses of North Carolina should have as its first section the title Horses of North Carolina and its tags should be horses, north, Carolina, North Carolina, etc.

Pinterest

Pinterest has metrics, but they are about your own site, whatever you’ve put into your profile. If you repin a lot of content, and it’s repinned in turn, the metrics aren’t very robust. But you can still get an idea if you look every week or so. Pin new content perhaps two or three times per week. If you integrate WordPress with Pinterest, or you add HootSuite, you can do this fairly easily. But check metrics on about a weekly basis in order to see if anything in particular has really gotten traction.

Tumblr

With few metrics, about the only thing you can check is what’s been reblogged or liked, and how many followers you’ve got. However, much like with Pinterest, you can connect via WordPress, and update that way. I recommend looking directly at Tumblr maybe twice a week at minimum, as it seems easier to find serendipitous content that way. Furthermore, take advantage of the high loyalty factor with Tumblr users and put together content as series or even as related images. You can also set up a bunch of posts in a queue, and they will be posted on a daily basis. The time for posting is always the same (Tumblr doesn’t give you a choice in the matter), but that covers you rather neatly if you’re going on vacation).

Google+

Because Google+ can be integrated with WordPress and HootSuite, there isn’t a lot of formatting you need to do. Post about two or three times per week and, if you are adding exclusive content, format your title with an asterisk on either side of the title (like *this*) to make bold print and use underscores on either side of content you want to italicize (like _this_). Add two or three hashtags but no more. Link your Google+ page to Google Analytics and check insights maybe once per week. You are particularly looking for when your users are most active. Once you know that, schedule your content accordingly, in order to coincide with whenever they’re on. Also, you can post larger images. Do so – they’ll stand out.

YouTube

Check the metrics for your channel, and determine what’s the most viewed or liked content. If you don’t have a lot of content, this is tougher to determine, so try out different things and see if any of them get better traction than others. There aren’t really specific guidelines for days of the week, number of days, or times during the day when you should post videos. Instead, make sure to tag them properly, write a good description of the content, and add a clickable link to your website or blog. Add annotations, a logo, and/or a featured video (explore the In Video Programming tab). Thank anyone who comments positively. Select the best possible screenshot for the video; YouTube usually gives you a choice of three when you upload your video (you can also upload your own image if the ones provided don’t work for you). It should go without saying that you should make the best video you can before uploading anything. Tag it for human and computer searching purposes.

Websites

Set up Google Analytics as soon as you can and check every few weeks at minimum (once per week is even better), to determine when people are reading your site, what the most popular content is, and how long they are staying on your site. Promote content that’s working or is like content that has worked in the past; jettison or change content that isn’t working. 

Match your keywords to the most popular content, and check word frequency (there are any numbers of free sites that will show you a cloud of your most popular words for a page). If a word that you don’t want to promote is overly popular, try to figure out how to either use it less, or use synonyms or otherwise reduce its frequency. 

Try to make pages positive if you can; e. g. write the story is good versus the story is not bad. While you and I recognize that these two phrases mean nearly the same thing, a search engine will not be able to figure that out. Of course not everything is stellar, and you need not lie. But positive sentiments tend to attract and keep readers better than negative ones do. Plus, if you only use negative sentiments sparingly, then they will have considerably more impact.

Other Platforms

Use your time wisely and visit these sites sparingly unless you’re seeing a lot of traffic from them. If you are a big-time visual artist, then it may behoove you to pick one or two places for your artistry (including Deviant Art, which I have not talked about) and call it a day. Otherwise, your focus can become really split and it can be harder to keep up with things. But experiment a bit. You may find that Instagram is fantastic for your original visuals, and you’ll never know that unless you try it out. The beauty of the web is that you can, as Avinash Kaushik writes, fail faster. And that’s powerful; because that means that you can succeed faster, too. 

The link is about StumbleUpon best practices. The image is about building the best Instagram profile. The YouTube video is a Storify tutorial. 

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