Read Along with the Course

The best thing you can do for your business is social media marketing – it’s a free, easy to use tool that’s easily accessible to everyone in order to promote your work. If you love using social media then of course you can utilise as many different platforms as you wish, but I’m very aware that a lot of people dislike social media and find it difficult – if that’s you then please don’t panic. You only need to be using 2 platforms for an effective marketing strategy and remember that it’s far wiser to do less than to overextend yourself. 

What social media platforms do you currently use? Why?

When deciding on social media you need to take into consideration your target audience – age range, genre of books. All platforms bring in a different demographic. Tiktok – booktok, Twitter – writing community, Instagram – bookstagram etc. 

Where does your audience spend their time online?

Lean into your strengths and what you enjoy – do you like making little videos talking about writing and your love of books? Tiktok is a good choice. Do you do a lot of work engaging with parents, schools and communities? Then Facebook is a good choice. 

Which platforms do you understand best? Which play to your strengths?

Now when creating content for social media here are some important things to remember:

• Consistency over frequency. 3x a week is fine for growth.
• Social media is the middle man 
• Main content is sales, personal, value: snippets, book recs, fun facts, writer tips. 
• Prioritise what you love: hobbies, personality
• Utilise theme days to make the process of coming up with topics easier 

What themes could you use on your social media?

The simple part of this strategy – don’t spend all of your time creating content. Talk about your work, what you’ve published before, what you’re currently writing and reading. Talk about events you’re doing and your inspirations. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself – people need to hear something on average 7 times to remember. 

What kind of things could you talk about easily without planning?

Create a resource bank to speed up the image sourcing process – photos, graphics, templates you can tweak easily. 

What do you take photos of most often?

Crossposting can be your best friend! If you write blog posts, then you can easily take passages from there to create multiple social media posts. You could use the blog post as a script for a vlog or facebook live, or even a guest talk somewhere. That same topic could be included in your weekly email to your subscribers. You don’t need to be coming up with new ideas all of the time – use what you have to its full capabilities!

Outside of social media – how do you promote yourself? What could you use for crossposting?

Consider how much time you have to devote to marketing yourself – this is especially important if you have a day job alongside writing. Take into account everything in your life: work hours, writing hours, kid time, housework, sleep, exercise, hobbies etc. How is your time broken up over the week? How much of that time is spent on your author business? If you spend let’s say 10 hours a week working on your author business – I’d suggest spending an hour a week of that doing marketing.

How much time do you spend working as an author?

Take note of what your audience likes and engages with best. Pay attention to your platform insights to check the data – and remember that the rule is 3 months! Use a strategy consistently for 3 months in order to have detailed data to analyse. Allow the data to guide you towards content ideas, don’t spend time creating content if it doesn’t work for you. And alongside the insights, market research is super important – check in with your audience and see what they want from you. Make polls, ask questions in your stories etc. to identify what they most want to see. 

Take baby steps to build up good habits. Don’t start ten different strategies at once because you’ll become overwhelmed and the strategies won’t work.