Anatomy of a Social Media Marketing Campaign, Part 2

Please read the previous installment of this article before reading on.

We have author Judy Nedry and her brand new novel, An Unholy Alliance.  This is Judy’s first novel.  The question we’re answering is “How do you promote a first time novelist on a very tight budget?”

The answer: Make extensive use of the Internet to reach the widest market as possible and attend book fairs and book signings to reach the regional market and the people most likely to appreciate the novel’s niches: wines, wineries, Oregon wine country, Oregonians, mystery and thriller fans.  These are also some of our target niches for web promotion as well.

Thus far we’ve built a CMS site and blog; optimized the site and content and created a content plan.  Judy’s first homework was to develop linking partnerships, get reviews posted, create relationships with other author-based blogs by leaving comments on/about their works.

Judy’s next bit of homework was to get her FaceBook account hopping by acquiring new friends and fans, as well as, adding bits and snippets on a regular basis to keep her in the limelight.

Next, Transmutation Sciences came in with a Social Media Marketing plan and began implementing the various elements.

1. Build a Twitter account for Judy.   www.twitter.com/JudyNedry

2. Sign up for an URL management account with Bit.ly.  Bit.ly provides several FREE functions.  We were primarily interested in URL shortening (Because we can only transmit 140 characters in Twitter, this is very useful.) and click tracking of said shortened URLS (We want to know which Tweets are most effective / effectively written.).

3. Sign up for TweetSpinner Pro account.  This is THE most important element in the campaign.  WHY?  Because TweetSpinner will help Judy manage her Twitter account and tweets from one interface and, most importantly, AUTOMATE the process we are about to begin.  While TweetSpinner is free, the Pro version – with all its added benefits – is a mere $18.00 per month.

3.a. Firstly, Judy will begin by populating her Twitter account by following friends and fellow authors and publishers.

3.b. TweetSpinner Pro will then be setup to auto-follow anyone that follows Judy’s Twitter account.

3.c. TweetSpinner Pro will then be set up to follow people who use certain keywords and phrases in their Tweets!  “murder mystery”  “mystery book” “mystery authors” among them.  This helps Judy grow her follower list by first following them.  Later, TweetSpinner Pro will UNfollow people who don’t follow her back, keeping her account targeted to the people most interested in her content.

4. The next steps involve linking all of our sites together!  On Judy’s website, we add a plugin that displays a link to her Twitter account and shows her five most recent tweets.  On Judy’s FaceBook account, we use a plugin that links up both her website AND her Twitter account: thusly each new post on her Writer’s Blog shows up on her FaceBook and each new tweet is also posted to her FaceBook account.

5. Now for the plan!  What would attract someone to a first-time novelist’s first mystery novel?  In addition to providing a sample of the book on her website we could give away copies!  Everyone loves to win something!  The contest we’ve developed will be a Twitter-based contest where a number of clues will be broadcast via Twitter (and subsequently posted to her website and FB accounts).  If you read enough clues you may be able to guess who the evil-doer was!  Guess who the killer was and you  will win a hardbound copy of the book autographed by the author and some wine-related merchandise!

Judy’s homework was to pull enough clues from her book, An Unholy Alliance, in 120 character snippets in order for someone to make a guess who the killer was.  Once we received the clues, we created custom links for various pages on her website using Bit.ly then added the clues and Bit.ly links to TweetSpinner Pro.

Then, in TweetSpinner Pro we assigned each tweet a time for release – once every 24 hours.  With 30-odd clues intermixed with general promotional statements, it will take 48 hours to read all of the clues!  Then the system repeats for every day in September!

We’ll continue to manage the promotion – watching for trends, seeing if particular clues are more (or less) effective than others at attracting traffic, and making any necessary changes.  If you haven’t had a chance, please visit Judy Nedry’s website, read a sample of the book, check out the events page to see where she’s signing, and clicking a link to buy a copy of the book.  don’t forget to follow Judy on her Twitter account and try your luck at determining the killer and winning a copy of the hardbound and autographed version of the book!