3 SocialSocial media is the wave of the future and the way authors will be creating relationships with readers and promoting their books for years to come. Not all social media sites are created equal. While you houldn’t overlook any social media site, as an author there is such a thing as stretching yourself too thin. The idea then is to find up to three social media sites to use to share your book information, events and other fun stuff and then to use them exclusively. Here are my top three social media sites.
1. Pinterest. Pinterest is my favorite social media tool bar none to use. I love being able to zip around the web and find interesting articles and photos to pin to my board. The beauty of Pinterest is that the majority of the users are women. If you target your books to a mostly female audience then Pinterest is for you. Find out more about using Pinterest to engage readers and market your books in my article 5 Ways for Authors to Use Pinterest to Get More Readers.
2. Twitter. I love Twitter because it doesn’t require a huge amount of time to use and I can schedule my tweets using a service like Buffer or Tweet Deck. Also, with Twitter you can only use up to 140 characters in tweets, this helps teach you to write what you need to say in as few words as possible. The shortness of the posts mean readers are going to be more likely click and more likely to buy if they like what they read. And now, you can post images to Twitter as well, so remember those images you’ve been posting to
Pinterest? Well, you can now post them to Twitter as well with short pithy posts! It’s a great way to engage your potential readers and followers.
3. Facebook. Facebook can be addicting, what with all the games you can play and photos you can post and the list is endless. However, Facebook is also a great tool for the author. The reason? Facebook offers several things that fit very well into the Author’s marketing. Plus, it promotions arsenal, such as groups (and you can make these closed like an online member’s club if you want to). A wall you can post images or words to (personally, I love the images–those often speak louder than words). And a way to have a sort of subscriber list in the form of your friend’s list. While you can’t use these friend’s e-mails since they haven’t opted in to a mailing list,
you can post your latest releases etc. to your board and they’ll be accessible to all your friends. And if you’re an author who likes to help other authors you can allow other
authors to have an FB takeover on your fan page for example and this helps to drive new readers to not just your fellow author’s posts but yours. And speaking f fan pages. That’s another great thing about FB. You can have a fan page in addition to your profile page. Fan pages are great because unlike your profile they focus on what you want them to focus on, your brand and products.
While there are other social media tools, these are my favorite three and the ones that I use consistently to
market my books and myself. Along with other fun stuff, after all who can resist posting to Pinterest just for the fun of it!