My Marketings Learnings from Creating My Own Newsletter part 4/? - Social Media

Part 1 = Creating a logo

Part 2 = Building a website and landing page

Part 3 = Getting feedback

With a logo and a website + an actual product that I'm comfortable with, the next step is social media properties. As a one-person shop over here, I can't spread myself too thin.

Starting with Twitter

I decide to start with Twitter. I start there because it's well known for being a hub for news. I'm interested in creating Twitter ads (something I have previously only suggested and reviewed and revised, but not actually Hit Publish on the Twitter Ad platform). Also, MailChimp makes it easy to Tweet out a link to the newsletter every day.

I'm on Twitter. I've worked with lots of companies on their Twitter presence. I'm feeling pretty comfortable.

Step 1 - creating a profile. While not that hard, I learned that Twitter's official canvas area for the header (1500 pixels x 500 pixels) is not accurate. They actually lop off quite a bit of that space. So, I spend more time that one wants to trying to find the right aspect ration and creating a logo with enough white space to fit in to the header. And I have to get my logo into a small enough format to be uploaded as the avatar.

"Everything takes longer than you think."

The Perfect Twitter Header Size & Best Practices (2018 Update)

Then, I discover that Twitter isn't ready for me to start advertising. They have some policies in place that put a hold on new accounts. It's not entirely clear specifically what's holding me up. It's likely either "New accounts will be held in review for a period before they can begin advertising with Twitter Ads." or perhaps "the website in the bio should be functional and should not require the user to sign up in order to access the content."

This later requirement - My main page is a sign-up page for the newsletter. It's a daily newsletter, so the content is pretty irrelevant the next day. Not to mention the idea is that it's served to you. You don't have to go to the website to get the content.

However, in order to satisfy this requirement, I create another page hanging off my main page that offers both examples of newsletter as well as the full archive of content. Thankfully MailChimp makes this easy. Every day, the newsletters are put onto a webpage that's automatically updated with the latest email.

I did find a free Tweet scheduler (unfortunately Hootsuite no longer offers a free version), and so every morning, I pull out nuggets from the newsletter for Twitter.

It took my new account 7 days and roughly 3 Tweets per day to finally be allowed to advertise. Interestingly, I did not follow anyone and I only had 1 fake account following me.

Facebook

So, I move on to Facebook. Like Twitter, the image size requirements for the header and avatar aren't obvious. Facebook publishes official guidance and then cuts some of that off, not to mention that isn't optimized for mobile.

Recommended 2018 Facebook cover photo size specifications: Pages, Groups & Profiles

Then, I dig into creating audiences and promoting my page. Like with Twitter, in my career, I have advised, reviewed, edited and suggested optimizations for content. It has been a couple of years since I launched an ad on Facebook, and in that time things have changed.

Instead of blindly fighting my way through, I purchased an online Facebook ads course through Eazl. Even as clear as that course was, it did assume you existed before today, and because I did not, some of the processes simply did not work. I don't have customer information to upload in order to create lookalike audiences. They recommend more than 1,000.

I also learned about putting Facebook pixels on my website - in addition to Google Analytics, which I had already turned on, and connecting Facebook pixels to Google Tag Manager. Which led me to learn about the differences between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Never forget - "Everything takes longer than you think."

Even for seasoned professionals who have been working in social media since it started, the technical details of setting it up and connecting it all isn't a 2 min. job, especially if you want to ensure you can count, measure and cross promote.

It's all learning - no matter where you are in your career.

I'm sure I'll dive into LinkedIn and Google Ads at some point, but this early in development, I'm not trying to boil the ocean. I'm incrementally building and learning.