Experimenting with social media and brands

I currently find myself venturing into the world of social media.  I have toyed with it before and used Facebook to keep in touch with friends but I have not yet been brave enough to take on the challenge of trying to make it really WORK for our business.

 It occurred to me that one of the problems with Inspire To Write, is its identity.  The creative consultancy side is the main earner and is the service delivered to schools.  However, there is also the performance poetry side (overlapping with the consultancy), ditto the story-telling.  Then there are the books and the music.

Divide and conquer?

I decided it would be easiest to start with the creative consultancy.  I set up a Twitter account for this purpose @mason_creative and started selecting educationally related sites/people to follow.  This extended occasionally to publishing and poetry.  The good news is that currently 22% of people I followed have followed me back plus a few who found me and followed - I have generally reciprocated.  I have yet to find out how come some have tens of thousands of followers and if they have been generated via an app, just dedicated clicking or otherwise!  Hootsuite is the next phase, automating the posts to each Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account.

I intend to set up a separate identity for North Street Publishing that leads to our book shop page, Amazon and any other platforms I upload the digital books on to.  The music and poetry will lurk on the YouTube channel that I set up some years ago but which needs some updating.  I just need time to get my head round the rest of it before taking that on too.

My thanks go to...

Stephan J. Myers who spent time talking me through some strategies that have been successful for him.  Hopefully I can return the favour regarding the creative consultancy aspects in due course.  Stephan is the author and illustrator of the wonderful Loss de Plott stories and The Prayer.  Here is a link to his page on BookViral.com