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Note from Lisa:
Though I haven’t yet had baby, I’m overdue and not feeling very comfortable. So I’ve decided to start my baby break today. I’ve lined up posts from some amazing women–all working on balancing their own sets of diapers and deadlines.
You can expect to see one guest post a week all month, and then I’ll be back in March.
This week Vicky kicks off our guest posts, sharing some simple ways to integrate your kids into the social media side of your business.
Take it away Vicky!
As a writer, do you feel like you spend 10% of your time creating content and the other 90% marketing so people see the amazing stuff you just wrote?
I know I do.
Social media is a huge part of running a blog, website or marketing yourself online.
Just like content creation, social media takes a lot of time. The great thing is you can have your kids help you with parts of it.
Here are a few ways kids can help on several popular social media networks.
If you’ve been writing online very long, you’ve likely heard about the power of Pinterest! This social media platform should be on your radar if it isn’t already!
Tailwind
One tool I use to help me harness the power of Pinterest is Tailwind. It’s a handy program that allows you to “schedule” pins so you can be present on Pinterest day, night and everything in-between!
I have gone back and forth with my Tailwind strategy over the last year. The schedule is easy to add pin times to, but taking pin times off is more click intensive.
Enter your kiddos.
My latest pinning strategy included 88 pins each weekday and over 100 on the weekends. I’ve decided to scale back, but was dreading deleting the time slots myself.
I sat my 9-year-old down, explained how to delete a time slot and told him how many time slots I wanted remaining. He sat there and did it for me and saved me about an hour!
You could easily have your kids both set up and manage Tailwind schedules!
Oh the Twitter! I adore this social media platform. It is so easy to connect with others and make long lasting relationships.
I do recommend going to the settings in Twitter and marking the boxes involving sensitive material before letting your kids at your Twitter feed. Even though I am careful about who I follow, I’ve been shocked at some of the things that appear on my feed.
Direct Messages
It seems almost everyone on Twitter sends you a Direct message after you follow them.
The thing is most are a simple “Hi there” or “Come check out my Facebook page” or “I just released my latest CD, want to hear it?”.
That is all fine and good, but, when you are gaining followers, it can be daunting to see all the messages and then realize 90% are not “talking to you” directly!
Enter your kids.
You can have them scroll through the messages and look for ones that need your direct attention.
Crowdfire
I recently found a program called Crowdfire I use to help me grow my following. It’s amazing to say the least.
One way your kids can help is by utilizing the features of Copy Followers and Keyword Search that make it easy to find others to follow.
Give them a list of Twitter handles or keywords, and they can find people to follow. You can then look and make sure the accounts are legit and good for your brand, but, the research part is done!
Another way they can help on Crowdfire is “unfollowing” users who are no longer active. It is helpful as the program tells you exactly how long it has been since someone was on Twitter. You can tell your child to unfollow anyone who has been inactive for 3 months, 6 months etc.
Do you have a Facebook page?
Do you ever feel like the “visitor” posts on your page are quite hard to find?
Or what about how Facebook makes it tricky to find all your messages? The message request folder and the filtered requests and so on.
Have your kids check the messages. Not only can they alert you to communications you may have missed, it teaches them to be detail oriented and to look at the entire page for information.
Save Time, Teach Valuable Skills
Getting your kids involved in helping with the Social Media side of writing is a big time saver!
It is good for them to help, teaches them many skills and most of all gives you a chance to talk to them about internet safety while they are learning!
Vicky Warren
Vicky Warren is the mother of 4 boys. Between swimming lessons and fake light saber fights she is a writer/blogger for hire specializing in parenting, lifestyle and medical writing with a nursing background. She is an author and curator of content at LivingtheDiagnosis.com. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
Lisa, what a great post! I never would’ve thought to get kids involved with my business! Great ideas 🙂
Thanks Kim, Vicky did a great job on this post and I’m thankful to be able to post it here. I learned a lot about integrating kids into the social media aspect of my business thanks to her tips.
Lisa, thank you so much for letting me guest post on your amazing blog! I love all your advice about freelancing while raising kiddos! I hope that little one is ready to come meet your family soon, and I hope you are getting much needed rest! Light and love!
Thank you for the great post Vicky, and for the well wishes! Here’s hoping the rest of the family can take a turn holding this little one soon! 😀