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Social Media For Writers

photo courtesy of Anita Chapman
On Saturday I set off on my writer related travels again. This time to London, for NeetsMarketing's Social Media Course for Writers, run by the lovely Anita Chapman.

It seems fitting that I met Anita through social media. After learning lots of useful tips from her NeetsMarketing blog I invited her to be a guest on my blog back in March, and she wrote a fantastic post for me on Taking Twitter to the Next Level. We finally got to meet in person at the RNA conference in July and caught up with one another again at the HNS conference in September. But it was great to attend one of her courses and learn from her in person.

Saturday's course covered twitter, facebook, instagram and blogging. Whilst I've been blogging and using social media for over a year it was amazing to discover there was still so much that I didn't know. Anita was full of handy tips that were like little light bulb moments, as I discovered there's a much easier way of doing things than my long winded self taught approach.

Thanks to Anita's guest blog earlier this year I had already discovered TweetDeck and the time savings it can bring from being able to schedule my tweets. Her course on Saturday showed me the importance of creating an author brand across my social media platforms and helped me to figure out what that should be, and how to be more effective at communicating it.  My author brand will focus on things that interest me. Writing obviously tops my list, but with more emphasis on my novel set in the American old west. Hopefully the rest of my new brand will start to become apparent in the next few weeks...

You may have noticed my blog has a slightly new look this week. My logo is now in the header. I have added a twitter button and lots of other new things down the right hand side. Things I didn't know how to do until Anita's course.

Before:

After:





Here's just a few of the things that I learnt on the course:

  • how to embed a tweet and facebook post in my blog
  • how to use facebook groups
  • how to create facebook adverts - using boosts and ad manager
  • an introduction to crowdfire
  • how to use instagram
  • how to customise my blog

Thanks to Anita for such a fun and informative day

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Comments

  1. Anita Chapman11 October 2016 at 09:37

    Thank you so much for writing this fantastic post about my course, Elaina! It was great to have you there on Saturday, and I'm so glad that you found the course helpful. I love the new look of your blog, and can't wait to see what you do with your brand :)

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  2. Elaina James11 October 2016 at 20:59

    Thanks Anita, I thoroughly enjoyed the course and am thrilled that I've been able to make so many changes to the blog already.

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  3. Ellie Henshaw14 October 2016 at 21:28

    Hi Elaina, great write-up on the course. I'm loving your new blog page. You've made good use of Anita's advice. You've also given me some inspiration for my blog page.

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    Replies
    1. Elaina James18 October 2016 at 22:01

      Thanks Ellie. Glad you like the new look blog.

      Delete
  4. Rae Cowie28 October 2016 at 15:28

    What an amazing amount to learn in one session, Elaina. And the new layout looks great. : )

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  5. Elaina James14 November 2016 at 19:41

    Thanks Rae, it really was a great day, so much fun and very informative and it was fantastic to be able to come home and put all that learning into practice.

    ReplyDelete

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