Social media could be a powerful tool for marketing any product, including a book—your book. The audience is far-reaching, and with a clear understanding of the social media culture, reaching your targeted audience could be effortless.

And with the advent of technology, you can even use multiple social media platforms simultaneously. But before signing up and flooding everyone’s feeds with your posts about your book, you may want to create a strategy or plot your marketing plans so you could keep up and monitor your social media activities.

Here are some author hacks on how to promote your book on social media:

1. Content marketing

Content marketing can be achieved through your own website or on any social media platform for authors. Creating a page and interacting with your audience might be effective, but it will not be enough. Content will not serve its purpose unless it drives people to read your book.

An intimate connection with your readers is developed when they’re made aware of what your brand is about and if it matches their preference. Make it concise and catchy—something that would establish a signature impression of your book as a literary work and stir up the users’ interest.

As exhibited by Lenovo, they built a digital content hub that contained articles that emphasized their brand. This was visited by over 170,000 new web users, which landed them $300 million on sales alone.

2. Social media contests

If your social media account or page is a few days old, inviting people to like or follow your page might be tough. Some may tend to ignore your request unless you start a buzz and drive them to do it—this is when Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter contests come in.

How about you give out a signed copy of your book? Offer a free chapter or freebies in exchange for the users’ comments and have them share and tag some of their friends to make them do the same thing.

One of the best ways to expand your social media reach is to offer freebies. They say “The best things in life are free. Freebies often make people happy and receptive.

There is also the option that you could run an online contest, and the winner gets one of your books for free.

This strategy works very well given how the online folks take this as an effortless contest to win, and who doesn’t love anything free for just a few clicks?

State Bicycle Company made this strategy effective when they multiplied their 4,500 followers to 480,000 through their Facebook Fridays—a contest encouraging users to post their bicycle photos online. Today, the bicycle company’s website traffic earned from Facebook is at 12% compared to other platforms. This also attributed to their annual sales that increased to $500,000.

3. Expand your demographic reach

Social media doesn’t consist of Facebook alone, it embraces a huge number of multimedia platforms. But you can narrow it down to the widely used platforms. Apart from Facebook, there is Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and/or Tumblr.

Some online folks prefer to use the other platform over the other, so make sure your interaction is consistent in your preferred social media sites.

A recent social media statistic ranks Facebook as the commonly used online platform, garnering over 2.2 billion active monthly users. YouTube garnered 1.5 billion active monthly users, Instagram with 800 million monthly users, and Twitter over 330 monthly active users.

4. Show off photo proofs

Credibility is important, and you just don’t want to gather likes alone but also live up to what your marketing endeavor has envisioned.

Your efficiency as an author can be visually demonstrated to your audience by posting pictures of different people acknowledging your book. This redefines the impression of your book to a whole new level of leisure reading and introduces them to the idea of how book-worthy your work is once photo proofs circulate online.

5. Hashtags are forever

If you’re not aware, putting # before a word holds a strong power in social media. It builds up brand recognition and a collection of similar posts every time your audience clicks on it.

It gives them a glimpse of your book’s current social media status and the number of people online who have acknowledged your work.

This was made possible when Disney proposed the idea of donating $5 to the Make a Wish Foundation for every Mickey Mouse photo posted with the hashtag #ShareYourEars on all social media platforms. This campaign eventually created a huge buzz on the Internet and resulted in them over $2 million donations.

If you’re curious more about how hashtags work, All Hashtag and Ritetag will be a great hashtag companion in generating top hashtag suggestions to activate your online engagement and social media advertising.

6. Make use of online influencers

Online influencers are personalities who have established a name in the online community and are acknowledged by over a thousand or millions of people online. You can partner with these influencers to endorse your book and get them to purchase your book.

Start your list of influencers through Klear orFollowerwonk. There you can find influencers that are in line with your field of interest or brand. The mentioned websites will make it easy for you to find influencers that can further promote your book in any social media category.

7. Find your target market

This is basic and one of the most significant aspects that must be taken into consideration. Your target market may vary depending on the category of your book.

If you’re writing a children’s book, this makes children your target market. Identifying your target market will narrow down your choice of social media sites. Also, choose the site where your targeted prospects will mostly spend time.

8. Build your own author website

Websites give the impression that you are a credible writer. Credibility and relevance are something you want to earn from your audience, and you can achieve it through investing in a website.

Apart from the social media sites, websites are accessible regardless of whether users are not signed up to any social media accounts, making them reachable to another set of audiences.

The website/blog is particularly useful because it gives you a platform from where you could share your content and key information about yourself.

You could actually post write-ups that are totally different from your book but could still reach your targeted audience: for example, your journey as an author and how you courageously took the first step to publish something you wrote. Also, you could share your knowledge about writing that aspiring authors and even students could use in their own writing.

Your website will feature anything about your book or anything that would catch your target market’s attention.

9. Schedule your post

One of the most important aspects of running a social media campaign is your scheduling. Remember, if you are going to post content, you should make sure that it is at the most conducive time.

As a rule, you should take the time to research the best times to release your content. Once you find out the best time, you should make a social media calendar for yourself. This will serve as a guide on when you should post your content.

10. Be thematic

Aside from having a calendar on when you are going to post your content, you should also take the events that take place on a specific day.

For example, it is Christmastime. If you want to take advantage of the events, you should create content that is in relation to the holidays. Arm yourself with themes that revolve around Christmas (or any other holiday).

11. Be accommodating

If you want to utilize social media to the best extent possible, you should be as social as possible. Remember that you will be marketing your content through social media.

This means a multitude of people will have access to your content. As a rule, if someone contacts you and asks you about your work, you should be as accommodating as possible.

This also goes for any comments on your various social media platforms. It is not a guarantee, though, that everyone you meet on any social media platform will be kind and encouraging, so you will have to exercise patience to the utmost level to bear with them.

12. Share other people's content

Aside from sharing your own content, you should also take the time to share other people’s content. This content could be from a writer friend of yours or a fellow book blogger or one of your inspirations or influences.

The key advantage of sharing other people’s content is that it adds diversity to your platforms and creates traffic between your author blog and that of other writers. Also, if there are fans of the same people you look up to and they found your post about them, there will likely be more people that will check your post and may see your own book.

13. Use Facebook analytics

If you want to enhance the effectiveness of your Facebook social media campaign, you should make sure that you understand your followers. The better you understand your followers, the more effectively you will be able to cater to their needs.

The best way to do this is to check on your Facebook analytics. Facebook Analytics gives you insight on who views your content (you would generally have an idea about the demographics), you will be able to find out which content gets the most views, and likes. This will help you create better content in the future.

14. Use Twitter analytics

Twitter is a very potent social media platform; however, it is also a very fickle one. You could make a tweet, and it could receive a great deal of attention and retweets.

Or on the contrary, your tweet could backfire and you will get backlash from it. If you want to find out which tweets had the most impact, you should check on your Twitter analytics.

Twitter is where everybody’s opinions can be heard—or more aptly, read. Generally, you will get to know the types of people that react to your tweets and through this, you could get your targeted audience.

15. Create shareable content

Another way you could improve your overall social media marketing is to create sharable content. There are many types of shareable content that you could share without being charged with copyright issues.

Ensure they are visually pleasing and could compel potential readers to check out more of your content, and eventually your work. Some great examples of shareable content are images, snippets, “why” articles, “how-to” articles, and infographics.

16. Start an Instagram campaign

Yet another effective way you could enhance your social media reach is to run an Instagram campaign. The social media platform predominantly deals with videos and pictures.

If you want to run an Instagram campaign, you should make sure your Instagram feed is as aesthetically pleasing as possible. If you are going to post pictures on Instagram, you should make sure that they are compelling and capture your image as a writer.

Aside from making your videos and pictures as attractive and catchy as possible, you should also make sure that your feed is cohesive and follows a set theme.

17. Create a Facebook group

Facebook is known as the most popular social media platform in the world. What makes Facebook very effective as a social media platform is its incredible reach and versatility.

If you want to improve your reach as a writer, it is important that you set up a Facebook group for your author brand. This will act as a major staging point for your other social media platforms. It is also a great platform to start a fanbase for your work.

18. Launch a Twitter campaign

Twitter is one of the most potent social media platforms in the world. The social media site is often used as a platform wherein you could share your opinions on specific topics. By starting a Twitter campaign, you could expand your influence as a writer. Remember though that Twitter is a very popular platform, and it could be a bit difficult to make an impact through Twitter. As a rule, you should aim to make your tweets both entertaining, and informative. You should also check the best times to post your tweets.

19. Connect with your readers

If you want to make your work more compelling to your potential readers, you should strive to connect with them more. An effective way to do this is to be open about your life as a writer. Think of it as a sort of “behind the scenes” look into your life as a writer.

Conclusion

When it comes to marketing your work through social media, you should know the best methods that will save you both time and money. As with all other endeavors, you need to exercise caution and good judgment when you are on any social media platform, especially if you are marketing your name and your product.

Promoting your book on social media can get hectic, so you will need all the help you can get. Writers Republic offers marketing services that cover social media promotion such as the Book Launch Program.