Social media is a multi-billion dollar industry that has taken the world by storm. Although compared to other media, it is relatively new, but social media has already become a critical component of our lives, whether for fun or business, the importance of social media can no longer be over-emphasized, and it is fast becoming indispensable in our daily lives.
A 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report revealed that a size-able 86% of marketers said that social media was important to their businesses. Also, 75% of marketers reported positive results regarding traffic increase as one of the major benefits of social media; the report also revealed that more than half of marketers who have used social media marketing for over a three year period reported an increase in sales over that period.
Facebook and Twitter alone have a combined subscriber base of over a billion, this then makes it a matter of common sense that any personal or business information that is targeted at people would be effective on platforms like these. Like every other business owner, writers can also take advantage of these ready-made market, most of which are free, to create and maintain a point of contact with customers and potential book buyers, and the following are ways authors can sell their books on social media:
First, you have to be interested and actually enjoy using the platform, anything that is forced would find it hard to sell, before you can convince people to buy your books, you must be interested in the platform of your choice, you must enjoy being on it. It is called social media for a reason, and for you to maximize its full marketing potentials, you have to respect its fundamental purpose, which is to socialize.
Focus Is The Key To Social Media
Secondly, you must be focused. You need to identify your target market or subscribers and tailor your posts and interaction in their direction, consistency is very important in this case, you must be known for a particular type of posts and you must stick to it. For an author interested in selling books, it makes sense that the bulk of your posts and interactions would be about books, maybe not necessarily your books, but books in general.
Lastly, don’t be pushy. Pick your moments well, apply the 80/20 rule, always give away more than you ask for, and you are lucky that in this case, what you are giving away does not necessarily have to involve money, it could just be helpful tips on books for your followers, or recommendations.
No matter what your opinion on the topic is, the truth is that social media is here to stay and is now one of the most important parts of our lives.
Whatever it is you have to sell, social media gives you easy access to your readers, so take advantage of this (mostly free) opportunity today.
Finding Keywords and Hashtags
When using social media you have to discover the correct words and use hashtags to discover readers and other authors in your genre to connect with. Most authors in the genre you are writing in are also reading that genre. Even if you are not focusing on them for book sales you should find them and offer to work with them. You can find 5 or 6 authors and go around retweeting each others post, share on Facebook, and put each others book links in their newsletters. Either way you have to discover the popular hashtags and use them.
One of the most popular tools I have seen is Hashtagify.me. If you click on the link you will see I already pre-populated it with books and you can see the other hashtags that are associated with that keyword.