If you want to learn about social media you have to try new things and see what works. More importantly you have to stop doing what doesn’t work.
I see a lot of authors lately using social media to sell books. When you submit an interview to our sites I ask the question at the end of the email about how did you find out about us and what your biggest struggle.
Many of the questions I get are about social media.
A lot of the authors don’t know what to tweet or put out on social media. They don’t feel like marketing books because they’d rather write one and that makes total sense to me. I think the struggle that most authors have is they think that they have to go on social media and keep putting up “Buy my book! buy my book! buy my book!!!!”
It’s the opposite that is actually true, authors can sell books on social media but should never ever go the route I just explained above.
Social media is about being social. You wouldn’t walk into a crowded room and yell at the top of your lungs buy my book buy my book buy my book! Of course not nobody would ever buy your book. If you suddenly walk up to a table and introduce yourself and say that you are a writer somebody would ask you “Hey what type of books you write?
Eventually it would lead to a conversation and then you can tell them if you want to check out the books visit my website or wherever you are selling your books. They end up telling other people about your book, if they like it of course and you end up with more people buying your book from one conversation. It’s the same in social media a little interaction 5 to 10 minutes a day.
I manage a lot of social media accounts as you can imagine with all the book sites. I have some prescheduled tweets and Facebook post to go out every day. I have one set up the morning, one for the afternoon, and one or two for the evening. It will ask general evergreen questions for example if it’s Monday I will ask something like “How was your weekend did anybody do anything exciting?”
This will end up getting two or three responses where I can then talk back and forth with the person and get to know them a little better. It can be a complete stranger or it could be somebody new who just happened to be follow my profile. Just opening up the lines of communication is important.
Since I had this question asked a lot I should set up some sort of a spreadsheet for excel or Google sheets. What things to tweet and to schedule for Facebook post.
I use HootSuite which is a program that allows you to upload both tweets and bulk Facebook messaging.
When you see me put out an author interview in the social media odds are it was either HootSuite or a program called Shareist which automates a lot of my social media also.
This leads me to another thing. What exactly to Tweet out or schedule Facebook post on social media. If you have a YouTube trailer you can put that out. If you have done an author interview on a website you can put that out. If you have done a podcast you can schedule that out.
The best thing to do is open up a spreadsheet with a Google Docs or an Excel spreadsheet and make a list of places where you have been interviewed all with links to like your Amazon book page YouTube trailer page. You can also mix in a few evergreen tweets like “I’m writing this afternoon what are you doing?”
After you have the sheet set up once you can use it over and over again. People are online at different times and odds are that they can’t remember the same tweet that you tweeted seven days ago. The only person that will know is you.
One of the main reasons why we do the author interview series on almost all of our sites is so that authors have something that they can put out on social media. Most of the smarter authors take their author interviews and end up putting it out on scheduled posts on Facebook or on Twitter.
I do it like once every 30 days on every 90 days an I will post something like “Hey I was just interviewed and featured on Awesomegang” and then provide a link to that interview. I’m sure that if you are an author and you been around for a while you have plenty of places that you’ve been interviewed that you can use for a social media blast.
When an author does an interview with us on any of our sites we put the post live and we send out the social media. After that it’ll rotate every 30 to 60 days and go out at the social media again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten email from an author that did an interview a year ago thanking us. They had a few more book sales and the only thing they can trace those sales back to is the year old social media blast from an interview. It is a great feeling getting those emails.
After you’ve done one or two interviews you have a whole bunch of stuff to put out on social media. Let’s just say you do in author interview for instance. You could then write a series of five posts and put it into an Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet. You can drop it in your Google sheet the URL into five different boxes and write five different things, for instance the first one could say.
Let’s use Facebook is an example since those post can be longer.
1 – I had a great time being interviewed on awesomegang! Some of the questions were really revealing and then add the link to that.
2 – Awesomegang just interviewed me and the questions were tough but I got through it. If you want to learn a lot more about me and my books go here and read it and of course you add the link.
3 – Man those guys over at Awesomegang know what they are doing. They interviewed me and asked some of the best questions I’ve ever been asked. And insert the link.
4 – I spent a few minutes with awesomegang doing an interview where I told my deepest dark secrets. And add the link.
5 – Want to know more about me and the books that I write here is an interview I did with Awesomegang and insert the link.
I think you get the hang of this now. Now let’s just say you did an author interview on all of our sites Awesomegang, Pretty-hot.com Bookreadermagazine.com, and Awesomebookpromotion.com that would give you four links if you created five different paragraphs to social media and included each one of the links you would have about 20 social media post that you can make today. It would probably take you about 15 minutes.
Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and get social. If you follow any writers and you find yourself engaged with them say to yourself hey what are they doing that makes me engage with them. They might be doing the same system I just explained.
If you haven’t done author interview with us in the past I encourage you to because not only will you spread the social media links we will spread them for you every 30 to 60 days.
If you have not done an author interview with us what are you waiting for. It is free and only leads to more exposure. Go fill out our author interview form here.