How Effective is Your Social Media
- By: Jessica Faust | Date: Oct 19 2017
No matter how much you love your social media account, at some point you’re looking to it as a marketing tool. You want all of your friends and followers to buy your book and you’re hoping to add thousands of more friends, followers, and now fans. All of that makes perfect sense so my question to you is are you doing everything you can to make sure your social media is found?
I’m no social media expert. I’ve learned what I know by doing and sometimes reading about doing. What I do know however is that hashtags work. So does a public account. I have multiple social media accounts. Some represent the business side of my life and some are private, for family and friends only. Those private sites are there for a reason. They are there so people can’t share the world I’d like to remain private. I don’t worry so much about hashtags, location, and tagging when I use those sites. With the BookEnds public sites though, each post is tagged and hashtagged consciously. I want each post to spread throughout social media. I hope people discover us and share what we’re posting. I’m hoping that when I post an Instagram photo of one of our books at the publisher’s booth at BEA that everyone in attendance at BEA, and those not able to attend, will find it and will discover BookEnds (and your book). Therefore I tag the author, the publisher, and BEA. I add the location and I hashtag the genre, the author’s title, BEA, and anything and everything that people might be searching or following hashtags for. In fact, I research hashtags.
Twitter is great for hashtags. Have you ever noticed that Twitter tells you what the trending hashtags are? Do you use those? If you’re randomly posting a bit of motivation on Monday have you thought about #MondayMotivation (this works in Instagram too)?
If you want to get a better sense of how to effectively use hashtags look no further than your own publisher. How are they hashtagging or tagging their photos or Tweets? What hashtags are they using?
Using social media is an incredibly effective way to market you and your book, but only if you’re using every possible tool.
I understand how effective social media is for published authors (or authors with their debut pending), but what do you think for unpublished authors? I hear such conflicting advice on this. My thought was that it was better to spend energy on writing when you have nothing specifically to offer as an author, so I have social media and spend some time on their, but it isn’t something I actively focus on.