The App That’s Like Hiring an Entire Social Media Team

On this week’s Writing Momentum podcast, Chris and Gena discuss one of their favorite apps for writers: SocialBee. Chris explains how they set it up, how they use it, and how it’s like having an entire social media team at your disposal. If you want to use social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram to promote your book sales and build a relationship with your audience, see how a content management app like SocialBee can work double-time for you.

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Links:

• Writing Moments – Write with us and give your writing momentum!
• SocialBee – Social Media Content Management for Writers
• Special Rare coupon for SocialBee: MOMENTUM20 – Lock in 20% off for LIFE!

Episode 34 Transcription:

[00:00:13].770] - Gena
Hi. Welcome to the Writing Momentum podcast. I'm Gena Maselli, and I'm here with my husband, Chris.

[00:00:20].400] - Chris
I'm Christopher Maselli, her husband.

[00:00:22].310] - Gena
He's my better half, for sure, and we are having a really good day today.

[00:00:28].040] - Chris
And why is it such a good day?

[00:00:30].230] - Gena
Our oldest child just got her driver's license.

[00:00:37].140] - Chris
It's kind of a little nerve wracking, but actually she's driving very well, isn't she?

[00:00:42].760] - Gena
She's driving very well, but what this means is that she went to the grocery store for me today. She brought me back Starbucks, so I'm kind of loving life right now. I know that I've got about a six month window, and then she'll be tired of running errands for me, but for the time being, she's happy to do it, and I get a little bit of a break. So what is a good day for me.

[00:01:07].840] - Chris
Right now it's a treat to drive and do errands.

[00:01:10].130] - Gena
Oh, my gosh. I will say, any of you who have gone through this momentous moment of having a child, a teenager, finally be able to drive, hit me up with all the good vibes. Send us information about all the good vibes of what we have to look forward to. I do know that I sent her out of the house today with her and our youngest and yelling as she's going, just remember, you guys are the most important things, so be careful. So, yeah, I'm having a mom moment here, but super excited. Tell me what I have to look forward to. Don't tell me any of the bad stuff, though. I don't want to get the bad stuff.

[00:02:00].290] - Chris
But that's not why we're here today.

[00:02:01].650] - Gena
That's not why we're here today. I just thought I'd give you a glimpse into our lives here. We are talking about something today that is really important to us, and it's important because this is so natural to Chris. And a lot of people who attend any of the classes that he teaches, anybody who talks to him for longer than about 30 minutes will be able to tell you that Chris is two things. He's very techy.

[00:02:34].470] - Chris
Yeah, I am techy.

[00:02:35].590] - Gena
He loves technology. He's constantly learning. And the other thing is that he loves to help other people succeed. And he's super kind about it. He shares his knowledge. Anybody who knows Chris knows that.

[00:02:51].250] - Chris
That's so nice for you to say.

[00:02:52].440] - Gena
It's very true. And you regularly have people calling you to ask you questions. He is help desk for our families. He's just really good with technology. And he also is very much a systems guy. He will systemize pretty much anything in his life that he can systemize. He will systemize.

[00:03:16].930] - Chris
I think we found it important as 21st century entrepreneurs right authors that you have to systemize some things, and you have to use technology in order to succeed in the space. Because, honestly, we're what you call solopreneurs, right? We are individual entrepreneurs. And in order to get all the stuff done that you need to get done, you can't do it on your own. And we've talked before about hiring virtual assistants in that. But also, technology can really help. It can make short order of some very difficult things.

[00:03:55].770] - Gena
It can. And we have learned that really kind of the hard way, because we try to do things all ourselves, and then we get to a place where we kind of get burned out, or we get where we just kind of like, you can't keep the balls in the air fast enough, and so something ends up dropping. And so today we want to share with you one of the technologies, one of the apps that Chris has found that he uses to help schedule our social media.

[00:04:26].120] - Chris
Every single day. It's working for us right now as we're recording this podcast. It's out there putting posts on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and LinkedIn for us that we have pre scheduled. And a lot of people, they do all of those things manually, and it takes so much time, but we can't really afford to do that if you want to have time to write, because who wants to be a social media manager, right? I want to be a writer. That's when we put these kind of things into place.

[00:04:58].120] - Gena
Yeah. So today I asked Chris. He said, well, what do you want to talk about? And I said, Well, I want to talk about SocialBee. I want to talk about SocialBee because I think there are a lot of writers out there who know that they need to be promoting their material. They know that. And this doesn't matter if you are traditionally published or independently published. It does not matter. You are still your best marketing department. And so I asked him to start sharing with us what this is. So what is SocialBee, Chris? Let's talk about that.

[00:05:32].720] - Chris
SocialBee is what you call is a content management platform. It helps manage all the content that you put on social media. So to lead into this, let me take you back a little bit, because about, I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago now. It's been a while. I've always been a freelance writer. I've always written. But for a short stint there, I led a digital marketing team. Okay? And what we did is we helped promote authors and some nonprofits and that into the social media world. And so it was pretty great because we'd get in a room and leading the team, I was able to say, let's do this on Facebook, and let's do this on Twitter, and let's do this on Pinterest. And the team would make it happen. Well, then we decided we were going to do something kind of crazy, and I quit my job. Gena was already working from home, full time, freelance, and we decided to get an RV and travel the US. with our kids. And so we did that. We could do that as writers. That's one of the great things you can do as writers.

[00:06:36].950] - Chris
Sometimes you don't have to be locked into one place. But in doing that, all of a sudden, I was completely on my own. And I realized we needed to promote our services and who we are as writers, and we need to take Writing Momentum to the next level. And so in doing that, I suddenly realized that I've got to use social media, right? Because that's one of the best ways to build your author brand. But I did not have a social media marketing team. I did not have someone that I could say, let's do this on Facebook, let's do this on Twitter, this on Pinterest, or this on Instagram. I had to find a way to have a social media marketing team. And I thought about hiring people, but then I discovered this wonderful technology, this content management technology that will allow you to post to all social media channels automatically. That's what social media is. It's a scheduler. But more than that, it allows you to load up your social media profiles and then over time, send material out there. So here's how it works. SocialBee essentially gives you what I like to call content buckets.

[00:07:48].050] - Chris
So, for instance, I created multiple buckets of content that I knew we wanted to share on our social media channels. So I created one bucket called author quotes, one bucket called writing prompts. One bucket. What else do we have?

[00:08:03].640] - Gena
We had a tag and share.

[00:08:05].130] - Chris
A tag and share? Yeah, where you tagged someone and share with them that post. And so we had several different buckets like that. And then I hired someone off a fiverr.com F-I-V-E-R-R.com for as little as $0.20 an image. She created social media posts for us, static posts like quotes and that sort of thing that you just want to put out there to keep yourself in people's feeds. None of this, of course, replaces just organically going out there and interacting with people, but it's a way to stay in the feed. So she created 52 author quotes and 52 writing prompts and 52 tag and shares, and 52 of several other items until we had literally hundreds of items to put in the buckets. So I log on to SocialBee. SocialBee says, okay, here's your buckets, and we dump those posts into each bucket. And then it's got a calendar. Now we don't have to go and put individual items on the calendar. That would take way too long. SocialBee does it for you. It does all this heavy lifting. So it says, okay, every Monday around 09:00 a.m., I'm going to take one item from each bucket one at a time and post them out there on the different social media channels for you.

[00:09:29].290] - Chris
It's doing it all automatically and it's really slick and easy to use. And so you just say, yeah, around 09:00 a.m. on Mondays sounds good. Let's put one item from one of the buckets out. Then around 02:00 p.m. on Tuesdays, let's do another one and it may be 04:00 a.m. on Thursdays, whatever, you just start dropping it around and over time those items are going out and they're keeping you alive in people's feeds. And if they're good posts, they engage with people. And then what you can do is all you have to do is go out there and respond when other people post other posts. And then of course, do your own post once a month.

[00:10:08].920] - Gena
Right. Like you said, this isn't a replacement for organic posts. We still want to be posting organically. We still want to be sharing other people's posts with our own messages on them and building relationships with other people in our fields and also with our followers and that kind of thing. But this is just a way to simplify that whole social media management.

[00:10:36].270] - Chris
Yes.

[00:10:36].620] - Gena
And we will even do this. We're coming up on WriterCon here. If you're in the Oklahoma City area, we hope you're going to come and join us over Labor Day weekend. But we will even receive those images from the content creator for WriterCon and we will go ahead and schedule those several of them out ahead of time. So it's not just like I have to do this once for the year. It can also be like, oh, here's a special event that's coming up. I want to mention it a few times leading up to it. And so I'm going to go ahead and schedule it and I'm going to do it. I always like if I'm using an image, I'll change the copy around it to make it more organic and feeling more authentic. And so I do that. But I'll do that a couple of times and then say go ahead, and this is when I want it to drop. And it just does it.

[00:11:29].520] - Chris
Yeah, essentially you can put all those items from WriterCon into a WriterCon bucket or an event bucket, and then you can say, I want you to post these over the next couple of weeks. Just go ahead and post these out there every once in a while. And the other great thing about this is that it doesn't just take your material and post it out there, but it has very detailed analytics across all the social media channels all in one place.

[00:11:57].600] - Gena
So you don't have to go to Facebook and then Instagram and then YouTube and then TikTok and all of that. You can pull it all together.

[00:12:03].310] - Chris
You can go into the one place in SocialBee and you can say, show me which posts have been getting the most interaction, which posts have gotten comments. And then when you go in there, you can see which ones are performing the best, which ones are not performing, and you can make changes from that point. It really puts you on a whole other level when it comes to social media. But what's great about it that, again, just to reemphasize, I did not want to be a social media manager when I came to work at home, I wanted to be a writer. So this allowed me to continue to be a writer and let my social media, once I get it set up, it kind of happens behind the scenes. And so it's really great. So we urge you to check that out. Check out look for a social media content manager out there. Our favorite is SocialBee and you can check out SocialBee. I'm going to put the link up here. If you're looking online, it's writing.fyi/socialbee.

[00:13:09].450] - Gena
Just as we're sitting here. Let's brainstorm for our listeners how they could use these kind of things like we've talked about events that are coming up. We can also do if you know that you're having a book released on a certain day, you could start teasing ahead of time and maybe go on Fiverr, or maybe you're really good at graphics yourself, but go and create a few graphics yourself and then drip them out leading up to your release.

[00:13:39].820] - Chris
So I just schedule them out over time and they'll drop out there for you. And you don't have to think, oh, I got to be sure I get on each one of the social channels and post this thing now. Just post it once and let it go.

[00:13:50].050] - Gena
You could do holidays if you want to wish everybody a Happy Valentine's Day or a Merry Christmas or whatever. You could do that with that.

[00:13:59].230] - Chris
You can preschedule all the holidays throughout the year so that you know, in January, if you want, you can schedule for Christmas next year so that you don't forget to put out that Christmas post.

[00:14:08].300] - Gena
Yeah. Or how about with some others? Chris? I'm thinking like, if you're going to be on a podcast, you could drip out, hey, I'm going to be on this podcast, and you could go ahead and schedule some of that if it's like a month out. Yeah.

[00:14:22].370] - Chris
The other thing it does is it allows you to not only create all those posts and have them drip out over time, but when you get to the end of all those posts, it'll start over. So, for instance, we have author posts. We've created 52 author quote posts. When it finishes those 52 and it's put out one a week, it'll just start over and start doing the first one again. But it also allows us to add more to the bucket as we go. So throughout the year, occasionally we'll add a few more quotes. So it just elongates that process. It's called making them evergreen is what it costs. So, yeah, check that out. It's at writing.fyi/socialbee. And that's also in the show notes. And I encourage you to check it out because it's really a good app. And we have a special for you. We've talked to the people at SocialBee because I recommend it so much, and they created a coupon for us. It is Momentum20. And here's the kicker about this coupon. This is actually a coupon I created well over a year ago with them, they no longer offer this great deal in any coupon.

[00:15:29].440] - Chris
It is 20% off for life. Okay? So you can get 20% off this app for life. That brings it down to being less than I believe, fifty cents a day during your month. Would you want to spend fifty cents a day to have all your social media taken care of? Totally worth it to me. So definitely go to writing.fyi/socialbee. Use that coupon. Momentum20. It's actually on that page. I put it on that page so that you'd have it right there with you, and you can make your social media just have that momentum, too. Pretty cool, huh?

[00:16:04].450] - Gena
Yes. Have that momentum. And honestly, just close that window in your head. Chris and I talk a lot. Chris tells me often, he says, you've got too many windows open. You're thinking about too many things. And when you have that many things open, I can speak from personal experience. It can really kill your creativity. And so just closing some of those windows, simplifying your solopreneurship and your authorpreneurship. Just closing some of those windows is going to help you keep that momentum in your writing and just in your business. So we hope you'll take advantage of that. It really has been a game changer for us. There you go.

[00:16:49].160] - Chris
Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast, we hope that you will rate and review it and subscribe to it. If you just click that bell and share it with others, with other writers that you think might benefit from it. If you think someone else might benefit from SocialBee, share it with them. Because really, it makes a huge difference in your writing life. And if you do go ahead and grab SocialBee, come to our website, Writing Momentum. Shoot me a message, let me know. And I have a full online training that I have created for authors, and I'll just give you access to that so that you can go ahead and make SocialBee set up and work for you.

[00:17:23].030] - Gena
Yeah, when he says he has a free online training, he's talking about a free online training. Chris has gone through the details of setting up SocialBee so that you can have access and you can get it up and going for you just as quickly as possible. So he's going to shorten that learning curve. So you're not stuck going, oh, my gosh, I got to learn this huge program, and I don't know what I'm doing, and what if I clicked the wrong button? Those are all the things that go through my mind. So Chris definitely shortens that learning curve, and he's going to get you up and going really, really quick. So definitely check it out. writing.fyi/socialbee. And your coupon is Momentum20. So check that out. And that's it. Please rate, review, subscribe, and what else do you want? And share it. Definitely share this also. And if you have questions about anything that we've said today, send us an email. We want to answer those. If we haven't been clear about something, definitely check it out, send it to us, and we'll do our best to clarify anything.

[00:18:32].100] - Chris
We'll talk to you again next week, every Wednesday, and remember that together we have Writing Momentum. Bye bye.