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An Author’s Guide to Geeky “Social” Stuff
 Posted by Hope Ramsay Dec 16 2011, 12:01 am in author promotion, Facebook, social media, Twitter Whether you are a published or soon-to-be published author, the chances are pretty good that you’ve already been thinking about social networking. If you’re a published author, your publisher has probably insisted that you do this. If you’re an indie author, knowing this stuff can make a huge difference in building readership. If you’re pre-published, learning this stuff before you sell can be a huge time saver. So, like it or not, we right-brained authors need to learn a few left-brain tricks. Unfortunately, I hadn’t learned any of this stuff before I sold my first book, so I had to do a lot of catching up while simultaneously trying to meet killer book deadlines. I would not recommend this method of learning. And so, in the interest of sparing you some of the pain I’ve gone through, I thought I would pass along a few helpful tricks that might give you a running head start in trying to stay “social.” How to have a blog delivered to your email account. Let’s start with something really simple, like having the content of the blogs you want to follow, including the Ruby Sister blog, delivered to your email. To do this, you’ll need to learn about something called a “Real Simple Syndication Feed,” otherwise known as an RSS feed. (And, no, that is not short for Ruby Slippered Sisterhood.) Every WordPress and Blogger site has an RSS feed that contains the content of the blog. An RSS feed looks like an Internet URL address, but it’s not the address for the blog — just for the blog’s content. Here is the URL address for the Ruby Sister blog feed. http://www.rubyslipperedsisterhood.com/feed If you follow this feed, you’ll see all of the blogs posted on the Ruby Sister Blog, displayed in a webpage without our site’s navigation buttons and graphics. Using an RSS feed, you can have just the content of the Ruby Sister blog delivered to your email account on a daily basis. All you have to do is visit “Feed My Inbox” (http://www.feedmyinbox.com/). At this site, you simply enter the URL for the Ruby Sister blog and your email address and voila you’re done. Every day you’ll get an email containing the blog posted here on the Ruby Sister blog. Obviously if there are other blogs you want to follow, you’ll need to get their blog feed. Luckily there are specific naming rules for WordPress and Blogger RSS feeds. Below you’ll find a link to more information about this, so you can figure out the feed for each of your favorite blogs and have them delivered to you, instead of having to go onto the Internet and search for them. For a full discourse on RSS feeds from WordPress blogs, follow this link: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds For more information on Blogger RSS feeds, follow this link: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=97933 Following blog comments It turns out that WordPress and Blogger have RSS feeds that include more than just the content of the blog posts. You can also follow comments posted on a blog. So if you want to follow the comments that are posted on the Ruby Sister Blog, the URL would look like this: http://www.rubyslipperedsisterhood.com/comments/feed/ Like any other RSS feed, you can have this one delivered to your email. Following a specific blog author It gets better — and more useful — because WordPress has a way of filtering an RSS feed. You can filter a feed in a number of ways, but for me the most useful is to filter the feed so that it provides only the posts of a specific blog author. So if, for example, you wanted to read blog posts that were submitted only by me, the RSS feed would look like this: http://www.rubyslipperedsisterhood.com/author/hramsay/feed/ Using a blog feed on your own webpage I use my own Ruby Sister author feed to build content on my own webpage. If you follow this link: http://hoperamsay.com/news-feeds/, you’ll see how my posts at the Ruby Sister blog show up on my own webpage. I don’t have to create these links by hand, using my RSS feed, they post automatically. My webpage uses WordPress so I have a huge array of free software “plugins” that help me manage the page pretty effectively. The WordPress plugin to display my Ruby Sister author feed is called “Syndicate Press” (http://henryranch.net/software/syndicate-press/), but there are others available. I am not familiar with Blogger webpages, but I’m sure there are methods that you could use to have your author RSS feed embedded on a blogger webpage. If your webpage is more traditionally built, you may have to check with your webpage designer for ways to have your author feed embedded into your webpage. But if you are blogging at other sites, you should not miss this opportunity to automatically keep your webpage content dynamic. Using a blog feed to create Facebook content Suppose you have a webpage like I do that includes a blog. I occasionally make posts on my own blog, as well as participating in multi-author blogs. Every time I blog, I want to make sure that I let my friends on Facebook know about it. If you visit my facebook author page, you’ll find my blogs posted in two different ways. I have a tab on my facebook page that shows the feed from various blogs that I participate in. In addition, every time I create a blog, a Facebook status update is created, with an automatic link to the blog. I use an app called “Social RSS” to make this happen. The free version of social RSS will post the blog feed to your Facebook status timeline or author wall in about 24 to 48 hours after the initial blog post. Because I want my feeds to show up quicker than that, I pay for the premium version of this service. I have to be honest, I like this app, but it sometimes malfunctions. I’ve been searching for a better way to do this, but I haven’t found it yet. If anyone has suggestions, please leave a comment. The point, though, is that it is possible to link your blog feeds to your Facebook page automatically, using an RSS feed. And anyone who regularly blogs, should be taking advantage of this connectivity. What else can you do? Well, it turns out that Facebook and twitter also have feeds. And with a little bit of research you can figure out ways to do some pretty interesting things. For instance:
I am only beginning to explore additional ways to connect my presence as an author on Goodreads and Amazon to my webpage and Facebook. So I can’t provide much help on those things right now. But I would sure be interested in hearing any other tips from readers and authors about connecting things up and staying social. Share:
              
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Wow, saving this post. Never even heard of “hootsuite” or “constant contact.” Great job, Hope. I am definitely behind the learning curve and need to catch up. Maybe a good January resolution!
I’ll be saving this one too! Thanks for sharing all of this wonderful info! My 1st book is coming out in 2012, so I will definitely refer to this post. It’s a keeper.
Happy Friday!
Sasha,
Thanks for stopping by. And congratulations on the book! I hope these tips save you some time on the learning curve. My whole goal in all of this was to figure out ways to save time. I’m not one of those folks who spends my life on twitter and facebook.
Thank you, Hope, for taking the time to write this post. I love my tweetdeck. It has saved me oodles of time. But your other hints for connection ease are totally new to me. I love your website–so pretty–and you have me thinking I need an upgrade. I’m definitely marking this page. Thank you!
My poor head is spinning! Definitely need to reread after the holiday brouhaha has passed (maybe it will sink in without the gazillion other things cluttering my brain vying for attention!) Well done, Hope. Thanks.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have invested the time in learning this stuff if it weren’t necessary to know once you make a first sale. And figuring out how to organize my “social” life so that I’m not spending all my time doing it has become a priority. The learning curve is steep, but once you figure it out, these tips can save you time better spent bouncing a grandbaby on your knee.
Amazing information, Hope! Thank you. I’m updating my website soon AND I’ve (sadly) had less time to follow blogs lately, so this is timely.
What fantastic info, Hope!!! I get so lost in all this and your post is so useful. Def bookmarking this one! ~D~
Oh, wow….this is going straight into my files!!
What great information–and great timesavers!!
Thank you for this!
I’m with everyone else–this post is getting saved!!!
I’m *such* a newbie to all this social media stuff. I continue to resist Facebook and tweeting…but I know I’m going to have to get over that someday and you make a compelling argument for why I should be getting over that resistance sooner, rather than later.
Thanks, Hope!!
Elise,
Here’s a suggestion — don’t do both to start out with, just pick one. Then you can gradually expand to the other. I personally think, based on market research that has been published right here on the Ruby Sister blog, that Facebook is probably where you want to start. Start with a personal profile, and then go find friends that you know. You don’t have to be wildly “social” at the start. Just get your feet wet.
Hope, this is a great post! I’ve never really understood how to use RSS feeds, so, yay, I finally understand what you can do with them! Thanks! LOL.
I haven’t responded to every comment posted here today, since there haven’t been many questions. I did want to thank everyone who took the time to comment, though. I’ll be sticking around until about 5:00 eastern if anyone has any questions. Then its off to Friday Happy Hour. Have a great weekend everyone and don’t let the holiday shopping get you down.
I’m with everyone else! I had no idea how to use the RSS feed thingy, until now. I’m bookmarking this and will start playing with all these wonderful new tools. Thanks so much for this, Hope!
Aha! Great geeky info, Hope. I love the email updates I get about what my GoodReads friends are reading — they all seem to have such good taste! It exposes me to books I might not have heard of before.
Zowie! This is great. Thank you.
This is incredibly helpful. Thank you, Hope!
What an AMAZING post, Hope. So helpful. Sorry I didn’t make it here this weekend. I’m absolutely swamped with getting ready to go see my Sammy for Christmas.
Sliding in late too, Hope, but really enjoyed your post and the feed info. Learning all the social stuff with new books really can leave you feeling wrung out. There is so much out there, and it can turn into a time stealer. I think it’s important to pick what you like because it’s hard to do it all.
This post will be help for a new author, thannks for sharing such a nice post..very knowledgable post.