Welcome to the world... you can see me, on that tiny island slightly to the left of the middle. I live in a town about 40 miles North West of London which is where the Meridian line lies at Greenwich. As an island we are kind of really bloody small compared to everywhere else, yet the UK accounts for a chunk of my book sales.
When I first began this journey as a writer I would get up in the morning and post news and reviews etc, at the start of the day before plunging into my men (not literally).
When I became a little more savvy I realised at certain times of the week, and on specific dates, there would be a surge of comments, or reads, or chats. Not being as stupid as I look it was obvious that as a UK writer I have to be very aware of two things when I use social media. Time and Day. I needed to post things on specific days where I saw peaked traffic, and I needed to work out specific times when I could interact with my biggest market (the US) while still managing to talk to my friends and fans in Europe, Australia, Canada ... you get what I mean.
I used a variety of tools to be able to write posts when I am fresh in the morning, and have them appearing at the right times for overseas peeps to see. Hootsuite is a good one, but a bit fiddly to use at first. I discovered Buffer a couple of weeks ago, that is an awesome tool.
The drawback... scheduling a happy post about something happy, like the wonderful lemon crop in Happyville. What if your article came out at the same moment as the news is announced that the Happyville lemon crop has been destroyed by 'weevle lemonitus idiotus' (a particularly virulent species of the citrus loving weevle). No one wants to be seen as insensitive, and scheduling does have the capability of causing this issue.
I'll be writing an article on Buffer in the next week or so, but for now I leave you with this amazing tool Tweriod.
What Tweriod does is give you the idea of when you should be posting your news/reviews/covers etc so that you get the best audience available.
It's not rocket science and a lot of us worked it out for ourselves so it doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know. But what it did do is confirm by using graphs that what I was doing is what actually worked.
For example Tweriod tells me that my audience is online en-masse at the following times (all times in GMT London zone):
- WEEKENDS - 5 pm and 6 pm, 7 pm and 8 pm, 10 pm and 11 pm (The US coming on line weekend mornings)
- SUNDAYS - 5 pm and 7 pm, 8 pm and 9 pm
- MONDAYS - 6 pm and 9 pm (again US mornings)
- WEEKDAYS - 4 pm and 6 pm, 11 pm and 12 am
Tweriod is this cool thing that looks at a thousand of your followers and suggests when they are likely to be online (as a group, not individually).
Go play.
Thanks for posting about this. I'm a a soon to be blogger and this is very helpful.
ReplyDeleteThank you :-)