One of the challenges facing any writer is getting the word out about their books. Just as important is getting the word out about themselves; people are more likely to buy books by authors they’ve heard of before. Because of this, involvement in social media is a key part of most authors’ marketing plans. Being active on social media helps increase your name recognition.
But managing several different social media accounts and keeping them all up to date can be a bit of a nightmare. I use various tools to help me organize my social media life, such as Tweetdeck and Buffer for scheduling social media posts ahead of time and Tweepi to recommend people I might want to follow.
But the tool I use the most is probably MissingLettr. I signed up for it about six months ago and have noticed a measurable uptick in retweets and visitors to my blog. While I’ve experienced a few hiccups, MissingLettr’s support team has been quick about getting back to me, and they take feedback seriously. Suggestions from their users frequently get incorporated into the app to improve ease of use and effectiveness.
What is MissingLettr?
MissingLettr is a service for creating social media drip campaigns from your blog posts.
What’s a drip campaign? A drip campaign sends out social media posts on a set schedule, separated by days, weeks, or months. It’s the opposite of a blitz, where you post to your social media several times a day about the same thing and possibly annoy all your followers.
Social media drip campaigns for your blog can result in a steady stream of people visiting your site over a longer period. You can set drip campaigns to go on for a year, repeatedly bringing traffic to your blog. When people visit your blog, they have the opportunity to look around your website, buy books, and sign up for your newsletter. It’s a great way to cultivate new readers.
Here are two examples of posts I’ve created with MissingLettr.
How does MissingLettr work?
I create drip campaigns for almost all my blog posts through MissingLettr. The social media posts can include just text, text plus an image, or text plus a quote graphic that MissingLettr automatically creates for you by pulling cool quotes from your post. The only time I don’t use MissingLettr to promote a blog post is if the post has a very short relevance window (a couple days).
The default drip campaign lasts for a year. But even if the post is only relevant for a month (for example, a submission call), I can create a drip campaign and then set an expiration date so no social media posts go up once the month is over.
Dashboard overview
Let’s take a look at the MissingLettr dashboard.
Above is the MissingLettr dashboard. It tells you how many campaigns MissingLettr had created from your existing blog posts that you need to review (20 in my case), how many campaigns you have already created and approved (113), and when your next social media post will go up.
The upper part of the dashboard also gives you information on the number of clicks you’ve gotten from your drip campaigns, lets you choose a URL shortener for your links, and has a calibrator where you can instruct MissingLettr on the best way to pull content from your posts. (This is really helpful if you regularly have content on your post pages that MissingLettr should ignore, like ads, sidebars, or an author biography that is the same on every post).
On the lower half of the dashboard, you can control what social profiles your MissingLettr account is connected to and review your account.
Under Settings, you specify what blog MissingLettr should pull posts from, tell them what time zone to use for your posting schedule, and set your preferred dates and times for posting. You can tweak your posting schedule to be different for each social media account.
Now let’s scroll back up to look at the branding option
When MissingLettr sends a post to your social media, you can set it to send an image from the blog post, or you can set it to create an image from a quote in your blog post. (You can also send text posts without images.)
Branding
The Branding box on your dashboard lets you customize what the quotes will look like. Once you click “customize,” you get a menu that allows you to change the way quotes look.
You can change the color of the background, the speech bubble outline, the speech bubble itself, and any of the text.
Just for kicks, this is what my quotes look like with a black background.
If you want to get really fancy, you can also set an image instead of a color for your background.
Above are the speech bubble settings. Again, you can control the colors, and you can also change the shape of the bubble to have round corners, take up more space, etc.
Under Quote, you can change the font (currently there are two choices, Open Sans and Lato, but I imagine they’ll be expanding that in the future), the font size and style, and the alignment.
The author and brand sections allow you to tweak the image and text that are placed beneath the quote.
So that was branding.
Scheduling
In the scheduling area (found unser Settings > Schedule), you tell MissingLettr the days of the week and times of day you want to post. You can also blacklist certain dates when you don’t want any posts to go up, such as holidays or days of commemoration. As of early February 2018, when you choose days of the week, those days apply to all your social channels.
However, you can differentiate your times of day between all your social channels. For example, I’m pretty active on Twitter, so it makes sense to post several times a day. But I’m not so active on Pinterest, so for them, I’d like to post only once a day.
You can easily direct MissingLettr to do just that in the Timeslots area of your scheduling page:
Approving campaigns
Now let’s approve a campaign that’s in my approval queue.
Pick one.
My next screen looks like this:
First, I choose what hashtags I want on my posts. MissingLettr suggests tags based on your post content. Sometimes they’re right on, and sometimes they’re not. You can delete any suggestions that don’t work for you. If none of them work for you, you can delete all hashtags.
On the next screen, you can review the posts that MissingLettr has created for you. It’s pulled both images and text from my post.
If you like the social media posts MissingLettr has created, you don’t need to change anything. If you want to tweak them, you can click “edit content.”
Then “Save”
Another way to change the text in your post is my clicking the arrows under “post content.” MissingLettr automatically create several different versions of possible text posts, so when you scroll through them, you’ll usually find several that are perfect for you.
You can tell MissingLettr if you wanted to the post to be accompanied by an image or a quote (that’s the “Bubble” option), or if you just want the post to be plain text with no image.
And you can add an image to your social media posts by uploading one from your computer.
Also, you can edit the quote content if you feel like they grabbed too long of a quote or a different half of the quote than you wanted. It’s awesome!
When you’re done reviewing all the posts, click on “Finished? Final step” at the top or bottom of the page.
Now it’s time to approve the campaign. If your post is relevant for only a limited time, set a stop date on your post. In this case, I set a stop date of April 30, because that’s when the submission call that my blog post is about ends.
Then I hit “Activate Campaign,” and I’m done!
So that’s my overview of MissingLettr. As I said before, I started out liking MissingLettr when I first got it, and they are continually improving it to perform better and work with more social media platforms. When I’ve had any technical issues or questions, they’ve helped me out promptly. I highly recommend it.
There are a few ways to access MissingLettr.
- Sign up for a free trial directly on the MissingLettr site.
- Use this link to get 50% off the first three months of your subscription.
- Sign up for a free trial of Briefcase, a software suite customized for entrepreneurs and small business owners that includes MissingLettr.
I hope this post was helpful, and I’d love to hear from you about how you manage your social media presence. Feel free to comment below!
Thank you for sharing this!
You’re welcome!