How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Book by Matthew Caracciolo

How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Book

by Matthew Caracciolo

You wrote a book. Congratulations! Now it’s time to tell the world about it. Unfortunately, the world is pretty big and there are a lot of books in it. How do you get the world to pay attention to yours? Social media will be, without question, an inevitable part of your marketing strategy.

There’s a lot of noise on social media, and other articles can tell you how to separate yourself from the rest, but the number one piece of advice I can give you is to be a consistent, relevant presence on your social media platforms. Depending on the social media platform, this may mean posting a few times a week (Facebook, Instagram) or even every day (Twitter). Generating enough content to achieve this, however, can be a challenge. Let’s look at some strategies.

Keep a social media calendar

A good practice is to maintain a social media calendar so you can plan your posts weeks or even months in advance. That way, you don’t feel as if you need to scrape something together at the last second.

Be creative with your content

You may be thinking “how on earth do I generate enough content to post a few times a week?” On top of posting promotional material for your work, consider posting relevant quotes (either from your work or not). Celebrate obscure holidays relevant to your work, like National Author’s Day or National Tell a Story Day. Subscribe to a calendar that keeps track of these types of holidays and plan accordingly. Ask open-ended questions to encourage engagement on your post. Follow other authors and keep an eye on what kind of things they’re posting to generate more ideas.

Keep it visual

Most social media is visually oriented, so an image or video is automatically going to attract more attention than just a text-based post. If you’re looking at the content you want to post and you’re thinking “this is text,” you can use a website like canva.com to spiff up some text as an appealing image. Think quotes, poems, and other blurbs with a relevant image behind it. Look for royalty-free images on websites like pixabay.com. If you’re putting together a blog post, the metadata behind the image (alternative text, title, etc.) is a good place to insert your SEO keywords.

Use SEO

Oh yeah. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is not only important for blogs or articles, but for social media too. There’s a lot of information out there about SEO and it’s too large a topic to cover in this small blog post, but the long and short of it is placing keywords and phrases into your content that you think people will type into Google will help searchers find what you wrote. There are tools out there to help you with this research. Most of it costs money. One website that has a limited free version is Moz.com.

Research and Use Hashtags

Hashtags are used as a way for people to search for content they like to see. Facebook and Twitter posts typically use no more than three, but you can really pile them on in Instagram. Again, look at fellow authors and see what kind of hashtags they are using in their posts. Do you see any that look relevant to your work? Instagram, helpfully, tells you how many times a hashtag has been used so you can do a little trial and error to discover some new ones. Mixed in there, you may also want to come up with your own hashtag to point readers to your previous posts.

This is more or less a 30,000-foot view of how to use social media to promote your work—there is plenty of more detailed information about all of these topics—but now you know what’s basically required to promote your book, blog, or whatever else you’ve been working on. Good luck!

Matthew Caracciolo is a freelance writer and author of The Waygook Book: A Foreigner’s Guide to South Korea from Monday Creek Publishing. He also maintains his own travel blog, Travel is Fatal, on his website. To find out more about The Waygook Book or Travel is Fatal, please visit matthewcaracciolo.com.

Image by Pixelkult from Pixabay