Today we are going to talk about interacting on social media. I’ve been busy lately creating graphics for my social media streams. I like sharing the wisdom of people much smarter than I am with my friends and followers on social media.
I feel if I run across something that I find really interesting, they will also. I’m always looking for ways to help people – to teach people so sharing quotes from experts, sharing quotes from peers are always a good way to help.
Canva
As I was creating some graphics on Canva – and we’ll get to Canva in a sec – and I ran across a quote from Pat Flynn. His quote “Selling to people through social media is like going to a party, meeting someone for the first time, and then saying, ‘Hey, do you want to buy this Tupperware?'” had me virtually hopping up and down with excitement! So I created a graphic to share on Facebook out of that quote.
I think this quote really resonates with me, as I’ve been trying to collect some thoughts on networking lately. I truly believe that when you are first starting out, networking is the key to finding your pool of readers. Posting “Buy my book” tweets and FB posts don’t attract friends – and people just tune this type of post out.
Back to Pat Flynn for a sec – I’ve been listening to his podcast for quite some time now. In fact I have a collection of podcasts that I like to listen to while I walk the princess puppy each day. (Mocha isn’t much of a conversationalist). Although I’m not always interested in the topic, I find the whole tone of the podcast to be motivating and uplifting!
Back to Canva…there is a lot of research that tells us that the human brain assimilates pictures much, much faster than it does words. I often try to post pictures on my social media streams and in many cases I use Canva to create those graphics.
I’ve also created a video to walk you all through how to use it, but one of the main reasons I like Canva, aside from it being rather intuitive, is that it comes with preset sizes for graphics. You don’t have to go look up what size is required for a FB graphic or a Twitter card – it is filled with all sorts of presets.
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On other news, I used a Christmas gift card to get a copy of Dragon. This is a piece of software that allows for dictation to documents. I’ve found that it doesn’t play nice in the sandbox with Word but I love using it with Scrivener and with my Gmail.
At the beginning, the program takes the user through a training process to help Dragon recognize your speech differences and then you are off and talking.
I’ve heard quite a few fiction authors say that they couldn’t ‘write’ this way, but since my books are a lot like my teaching, I can talk my way through content faster than I can type it. And with my carpal tunnel flaring up, this software is a great help. I’ve been working on a Newsletter/Mailing List book and it’s flying together thanks to this software.
Let me know if you use or have used Dragon and what your thoughts were.
And as always, I’m giving away free books. See below:
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