Twitter

It’s almost Christmas!

/ lizziechantree / 1 Comment

Hello everyone. It’s almost Christmas and I’m sure you’ve all been thinking about, or have already done some festive marketing. I have been asked to design a lot of Twitter adverts recently and have also made some for the people who have appeared on my Introducing page on my blog. They are a great way to liven up Tweets and statistics say that people get more retweets on Twitter if the tweet has an image. So my top tip is to include a photo or graphic image to your tweets. There are lots of programmes where you can design them for yourself, or download free images if you don’t have your own.

If you are unable to design your own, I charge £10 per design for  jpeg twitter ad. You can contact me from the contact page on this blog and all you need to supply is your book cover and a review quote or the text you’d like included, including your Twitter @ name and your website or blog address.

Don’t forget to join in with my #CreativeBizHour Christmas party on Twitter with me, @Lizzie_Chantree tonight, 8-9pm GMT. Just add the # to tweets and replies to chat to join in and tell us all about yourself and your work. It’s a wonderful place to share creative ideas and the hashtag trends regularly, so your work might be seen by different people and one varied timelines.

Here are some examples of Twitter ads I’ve designed:

 

 

Introducing Jess B Moore.

/ lizziechantree / 8 Comments

Today’s guest, Jess B Moore, is not only a great writer, but she’s fun, friendly and full of great ideas. Her books are a joy to read and if you haven’t picked one up yet, give one a try. In my view, you won’t be disappointed! Jess also has a beautiful Instagram page. If you like seeing lots of pretty bookish posts, pop by and check her page out.

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From Jess:

Jess B Moore is a writer of love stories.  When she’s not writing, she’s busy mothering her talented and stubborn children, reading obscene numbers of books, and knitting scarves she’ll likely never finish.   

Jess lives in small town North Carolina with her bluegrass obsessed family.  She takes too many pictures of her cats, thinking the Internet loves them as much as she does.  She is a firm believer of swapping stories over coffee or wine, and that there should always be dark chocolate involved.   

The Guilt of a Sparrow is her debut novel combining her interests in family, music, and small towns into a thoughtful tale of growing up and falling in love.  Her second book, Fierce Grace, follows similar themes in a whole new way, and is NOW available.  The Worth of a Penny, Jess’ third novel, the sequel to The Guilt of a Sparrow, will be out Spring 2019. 

You can read her new book Beauty & Melancholy in monthly installments by signing up for her newsletter. 

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Purchase links:
The Guilt of a Sparrow – mybook.to/guiltsparrow
Fierce Grace – mybook.to/fiercegrace
 
Author links: 
Website – jessbmoore.com

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Twitter for writers.

/ lizziechantree / 2 Comments

Hello everyone. Happy new week. Quite a few people have been asking me about Twitter and some ways to be social on it without it taking over your whole life. It’s not easy!

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I feel that as a writer, it’s important to be on social media like Twitter, as it gives my readers and followers on there a chance to find out more about my personality and writing routine. If people enjoy my Twitter timeline, it makes sense that they might also like reading my books. I do schedule some tweets, but change them up every one to two weeks. Twitter doesn’t like posts to be repeated more than once every 24hrs, so be sure to only schedule posts for longer than this time. You can change one word in a tweet and it will count as a new scheduled tweet though. Most of these sites have brief tutorials of how to use them and the scheduling is pretty say to do. You literally type the text and set the time. If you do want to add images, then you sometimes have to use the paid version.

Mostly, I pop by Twitter a few times a day, to say hello and post updates about my writing. I add funny photos that fit with my writing theme, which is humour and romance and try to lighten people’s day, as this is what my books are about too, making my readers smile.

Let me know if you have any other apps that might help other writers. Have a fun filled and creative day!

 

Apps that work well for scheduling are:

Hootsuite

SocialOomph

Buffer

 

Introducing Christie’s Crafts.

/ lizziechantree / 4 Comments

Today I’d like to introduce you to Christine. I met her via Twitter and she’s a regular visitor to my creative networking hour there called #CreativeBizHour She’s a talented designer and is here to tell you more about her beautiful work.

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Meet Christine:

Hi there, I’m Christine and I’m the fairy ‘behind the scenes’ of Christie’s Crafts. I create custom-made fairy doors and accessories that give children a doorway into their very own Fairy Wonderland to start them on a magical, inspiring and creative journey!

Children have the most amazing imaginations and their creativity should always be supported and encouraged. Fantasy or pretend play is a fabulous way of doing this whilst at the same time giving them useful and amazing skills for their future so in 2016 I came up with the concept of a fairy doors and accessories business in order to give them the opportunity of developing these skills.

On my website you will find many of my custom-made fairy door designs, even some for teens and adults. Some of them even have 3D brick effect textures on them and I also create themed doors to cover any occasion. Each and every door, along with a wide choice of accessories is personally hand-painted by me and can also be personalised to suit. I hope you like what you see but on the off-chance you don’t, I do also take custom orders.

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Reasons why fairy doors are great for kids and part of the reasons why I do this! 😀

Imagination – children can develop their imagination through fantasy or pretend play.

Creativity – fantasy or pretend play can help a child to develop creative thinking.

Self-expression – children are encouraged to make up stories or to even draw pictures for their fairies.

Language skills – children develop these skills though writing notes for their fairies and reading the fairies replies.

Recognition – fairies recognise children’s efforts and hard work and love to praise them and sometimes even give them a reward along with a little note – “I love it when you keep your room tidy as it makes it so much easier for me to come in and out through my fairy door” – “Well done for all your hard work at school”.

Fairies love to praise children’s efforts and hard work and sometimes give them a reward  – well done for all your hard work at school.

Emotional Support – fairies love to listen to and try to take away children’s worries and sometimes even grant children’s wishes.

Christine’s Website and Social Media Links –

https://christiecrafts.com

facebook.com/christiecrafts

twitter.com/christiecrafts

instagram.com/christie.crafts

pinterest.co.uk/christiescraft

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Sharing is caring.

/ lizziechantree / 5 Comments

Lizzie Chantree blog

 

Hello everyone. I hope you had an amazing weekend. Today’s Monday Marketing is about how shareable your blog posts are. I find it really frustrating when I find a great blog to read and want to share it with my 60.4k real twitter followers. I love tweeting about topics that interest me and hope my Twitter followers enjoy them to. I read a lot of articles and often add them to my social media timelines. If there is no way to share an article, I leave it and sometimes don’t return to that site.

Tip 1.

Add social media sharing buttons to each article. Most websites and blogs have plugins you can add to easily share to Twitter Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more. It might be worth taking the time to call to whoever is hosting you site to ask how to add these buttons, but with WordPress, you simply click the plugin tab, find the ones for social sharing and then click install. They then appear at the end of every post you add to your site.

Tip 2.

Visuals. Always add visuals or photographs to your blog posts, Tweets and Facebook pages. Tweet images get on average 150% more RT’s than tweets without an image and on Facebook, posts with photos or images get approx. 87% more interaction. The images often catch the eye and engage the reader of the tweet or post.

Tip 3.

It’s often a good idea to add your Twitter timeline and Facebook details to your blog page or website at the side of the front page. This updates as often as you send out a new post, so your site has fresh content and it encourages readers to visit your other social media sites. You can do this by adding a widget to the sidebar on your blog post. Once again, a quick telephone call to your site provider will be the quickest way to understand how to do this. Most blogs and websites have a social sharing section in the plugins or widget sidebar in the menu, where you just have to say where you want it to go on your site and then click install.

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Don’t forget to join me for #CreativeBizHour on Twitter tonight @Lizzie_Chantree for an hour of creative chat and networking. Just add the hashtag to tweets and replies to chat to join in.

Do mentors matter?

/ lizziechantree / 6 Comments

I have been lucky enough to have had many mentors in my life and I think they are so important when you are discovering a new field of interest. When I was inventing my first product, Runaway Spray, which is a ‘ladder’ or ‘run’ stop spray for hosiery, I had great support from business mentors from The Prince’s Trust When I wrote my first book, I discovered an international book club full of writers (RRBC) and they have been amazing in helping me to find my way in my new career, as have my fellow authors at my new publishers. I  provide mentoring myself through my networking hour on Twitter (#CreativeBizHour) and have been able to support people with new creative ideas through being a judge for Shell LiveWire’s Grand Ideas Award, and having a Facebook group where I share creative ideas with fellow artists/designers/ businesses/writers (Lizzie’s Book Group)

If you are starting a new career, or looking to push forward with your current job or hobby, then you might be surprised to find out how many people and organisations there are out there to offer unbiased help and support. Facebook and Twitter are full of networking hours and groups, you just have to search for them in the search bar and then join. With these groups, it’s good to join in and support others too. It’s about teamwork. When you have found a mentor and learnt what you need to, perhaps you can in turn become a mentor for someone else and help them on their own journey?

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In your opinion, do mentors matter and has one helped you in your life? It will be exciting to hear if anyone else has been nurtured and helped to blossom into the person they have always wanted to be.

Monday Marketing. 3 quick tips.

/ lizziechantree / 4 Comments

Happy new week everyone. Its been a hectic couple of weeks here, with a paperback and ebook launch, but it has been very exciting too. We all lead such busy lives, so how do we keep up with current social media trends and changes and not miss anything that might have an effect on our writing or business? There are places to go to find out about any major changes.

girl with books meme by Lizzie Chantree

  1. Facebook Newsroom: Facebook Newsroom  This page will give you details on how to control your newsfeed, platform updates, ad transparencies, Facebook community news and much more.
  2. Twitter’s Blog: Twitter’s Blog This page will tell you what if happening with your follower count, give tips and share latest news. Some people will see their Twitter follower count changing due to Twitter’s current policy on removing locked or inactive accounts.
  3. Instagram’s news page: Instagram Business News This page will tell you of trending topics, latest businesses that are popular and styles to follow.

Monday marketing. 3 quick tips.

/ lizziechantree / 9 Comments

Happy new week everyone. Here are 3 quick tips about scheduling social media posts or tidying up your Twitter feeds. Marketing can eat into your day, so I am sharing some great tools to help you schedule in some of the posts to save time. I don’t agree with all posts being scheduled, as the idea of social media, is to be social! Interaction is the main way to keep and grow your Twitter/ Facebook accounts etc.

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  1. SocialOomph: This a is a scheduling app. It has free and paid options. You can run a free trial to see if it is the app for you. You can schedule tweets, Facebook posts and blog posts, add images and links.
  2. Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a bit clunky for me, but it is a great place to start when you are looking for content to retweet on Twitter or you have your own information to schedule. Because this app updates so often with new news items, it can be slow. The upside is that there is a wealth of information to choose from and it is very easy to use.
  3. Manageflitter: This is a good app for unfollowing anyone who doesn’t follow you back. There have been recent changes, so unless you pay for the basic service, you can only have about 30 unfollows a day. For their basic package, you can unfollow as many as you like.

 

Monday Marketing. 3 quick tips.

/ lizziechantree / 3 Comments

Happy new week everyone. Today’s 3 quick marketing tips are about pinned tweets. I have written about this before, but it’s easy to forget how important they are. It might look good for your Twitter account to have hundreds of retweets of it’s pinned tweet, but if someone has already retweeted it, they can’t do it again. This means they have to search through your Twitter feed to RT your work.

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  1. Update your pinned tweet often. Even if you do it once a week, or every few days, it gives visitors something new to RT without searching your timeline.
  2. If you are using a daily hashtag, for example, #tuesnews or #MondayMotivation pin it to your profile for that day only. Check out the daily trending hashtags and add one to your pinned tweet that day. I regularly look at trending hashtags and make a tweet with it in. It’s great for networking and helps spread the word about your business or product.
  3. Regularly check out the pinned tweets of your followers and RT them. In return, some will do the same in support of your work. Having a pinned tweet shows the most current information about you. If it is years old, it is confusing to visitors and the information might be out of date.

Check out my Twitter timeline here to see my latest pinned tweet to get some idea of how it works.

Pinterest for writers.

/ lizziechantree / 14 Comments

 

Lizzie Chantree biz quotes 1

I’ve just read an article that was so interesting that I read it twice! It was about an author who used Pinterest for marketing his books. I had never thought about Pinterest other than a fun way to connect with people who enjoy design ideas, like I do. I am now beginning to see things a bit differently.

The article stated that Twitter posts have a 24 minute viewing time lifespan, Facebook posts 90 minutes and Pinterest post, 3.5 months! This is because people often go back to their favourite pins and re-pin them, share them, or just admire them and show them to friends. The most viewed pins have some sort of useful message or meme on them. Women make up 80% of users on Pinterest. On average pins are re-pinned 11 times.

Some tips for a great pin.

  1. Design your pin to be tall and thin like a bookmark. This takes up less Pinterest real estate on each page and makes it more likely to be repined. Size 300 x 800 px.
  2. Give tips or pointers. People love to read short tips, like this list!
  3. Give the edges colour, so that they stand out.
  4. Add links to your pins, so that when they are shared so is your URL.
  5. Add descriptions to your pins. Don’t leave those spaces blank. Use the opportunity to tell people about yourself or your product.