May 30

May 30 3 free tools your social media needs

You need to put your best foot forward with every post, EVERY TIME. Each social media post is an advertisement for your books, and needs to be approached in a consistent and professional way. Here are three free tools that can help amp up your social media game:

1. YAY TEXT

This site allows you to add bold, italics and underline text in your Facebook posts and Tweets. It's super easy and doesn't require registration. Just cut and paste directly from Yay Text into your social media posts.

*note: Yay Text has a serious negative side, which was just brought up to me. Some users, depending on their device or operating system, may not be able to see YAY Text - instead it will show up as just boxes.

2. SmartURL

There are a ton of link shortener sites out there. And if you are a newbie author, the FIRST thing you need to do is to start using them. Nothing screams 'unprofessional' more than mile-long URLs next to each vendor name. Google Shortener has a handy Chrome plug-in that allows me to right-click on any link and copy the short link to my clipboard - but it doesn't have trackability. Bitly is great, but my favorite is SmartURL for one important reason...

*drumroll*

The age-old issue with Amazon is the need to share every Amazon site for every country in every post. That can lead to a long list of links like this (which screams SPAMMY POST to Facebook):

SmartURL provides a link which recognizes what country the person is from, and sends them to the appropriate Amazon site. BRILLIANT, right?! So instead of a half-dozen Amazon URLs, you only need to provide one. Bam. DONE.

3. Canva

Graphics are king in social media posts. And Canva is my favorite go-to site for creating gorgeous images on the fly. They've got a huge range of templates for every social media need. Here's an example of two images I created this week on Canva: