Using Microcontent to Promote Your Writing | Creatively Sustainable

You’ve invested time creating your content. Once complete, you add it to your Content Master List. Now, let’s get the word out about it!

We’ll do that by creating microcontent to promote your written work.

What Is Microcontent?

Microcontent is short content you use to share about your book, blog post or YouTube video. It can be used for social media posts, for your Pinterest description, and, if you have a WordPress website, in the Yoast Plugin for SEO description. You can also put it in a newsletter to your list.

You need plenty of this content so you can drip it out over weeks and month.

Warning: this post was written in June 2020. As with all things marketing, especially social media, what works, what is recommended, and what is allowed will change. I will update this post as I learn of changes.

This post may contain affiliate links. That means if you choose to make a purchase, I may be compensated at no cost to you. I only recommend products that I have used.

Create Different Length Microcontent

You will need different length content for different social media sites.

Short — about 200 characters and if you are posting on Twitter, be sure to allow room for the link and the hashtags. These can be short summaries of your article, quotes taken from it, the title of the article — and variations on it. The more of these you can come up with, the more posts you can make.

These are the perfect for tweets, and can also be used for on Facebook (both personal profile, business page and groups you have for your books), Instagram, LinkedIn (profile, business page and groups), and Pinterest descriptions.

Shorter posts can also be the basis for ads you run and for your SEO description in your Yoast plugin.

Ideally, create 7–10 of these so you have plenty to use as you drip out your marketing campaign.

Longer — about 500 characters -these can be used places where you can make longer posts- Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. These can also be used in your newsletter.

Here you can go into more detail, give more information, and tell some of the backstory.

There is debate over whether longer posts get read as much as shorter ones, and how long is too long, but I still think it is good to have longer posts where you tell more of the story/back story. Experiment and see what results you get with both short and longer posts.

Create 1–3 longer posts so you can reuse them on other social media sites.

If you write your longer content first, you can take elements of it to create the shorter content. Likewise, you can take your shorter pieces and put together and expand on for the longer. Try and see what works for you.

Create Images and Hashtags

Get these together now and you will be ready to post on social media.

Images — the images you use in your post can be saved in different sizes to be used on various social media sites. The size requirements are different for each platform and change over time. Here is one place to check for the current image size requirements or do a search on image sizes for social media posts.

Understand that it is best if you have at least three sizes — one square, one vertical and one horizontal. These will take care of most of your needs. You can use an online tool like Canva to create them

Hashtag list — create a list of as may RELEVANT hashtags as you can. You will only use a couple of these for each tweet, but Instagram lets you use 30 (at the time of this article). Having a list to choose from lets you change them up on your tweets, creating more unique posts.

What hashtags do you use? Think keywords that tell what your post is about. Then, when you have room for a lot of keywords, think about ones related to your type of content (written, video, audio), to the genre you write in, locations mentioned in your content, etc.

Take Action

Pick one item from your master list. It doesn’t matter if it is one of your books, a blog or YouTube video. Choose something that you want to promote, perhaps something that you think hasn’t gotten the attention it should have.

Work through the steps above to create your microcontent. Then schedule your posts for the next week or two. If you have more time, you can take the same short posts and put with different hashtags and schedule tweets for the next few months.

Remember: This isn’t just set it and forget it. You need to check in on social media sites daily to respond to comments and to thank those who share your posts. Did you gain new followers? See if you want to follow any of them back.

Checking in also let’s you verify that your scheduled posts did publish. There are always glitches that don’t publish scheduled posts, and if that happens, simply reschedule them. At the end of a month, check your stats and see which posts got the most engagement — theses are the types of posts to focus on later.

Now that you have a plan, take another item from your Master List and follow the steps above. Then repeat until you have worked through all your relevant content. As you complete new works, do the same with them. Set a time to create and schedule the microcontent so you regularly promote your content on your profiles.

I have created a MicroContent Checklist to help you work through the steps. It is part of my Author’s Resource Library, which you can access when you join my list. You can download and use the forms, spreadsheets, and checklists. New things are added all the time, and you can unsubscribe whenever you want.

Originally published at https://creativelysustainable.com on June 30, 2020.