Social Media Tips for Authors and Small Publishers

October 30, 2016Kate CoeGuest Post, Self-Publishing, Social Media, Uncategorized, Writing Tips

Everyone knows to “use” social trying to cover all the bases. So where do you begin as an author or small publisher looking to make your mark in a clustered book world?

Know what they’re good for.

Each platform serves a useful and largely individual purpose in terms of promotion and engaging people with what you do. Here’s a brief, basic run through of some:

Twitter: Bitesize updates, good for socialising and interacting directly with people.

Facebook: Good for slightly longer statuses and more concentrated discussion.

Instagram: Visual. Got a book? Post it in well-crafted pictures. Got a dog? Definitely post pictures of them.

Youtube: For videos. Regularity can work well here: weekly, fornightly, monthly updates. With vloggers, you need to make sure these are of a fairly high quality to compete.

Blog: WordPress, Blogspot or your website are all great places to write longform pieces about topics that are relevant to or interest you, if you’re going for straight up blogging. Or…

Tumblr: Can be used for blogging but also a GIF-kingdom. Full of fandoms, and offers a little more freedom than other blogging platforms, and a readymade community.

Pinterest: Where you ‘pin’ images, links and more that you like in collections for people to view and pin again. Perfect for moodboards.

Linkedin: CV. It’s good for professional networking and snooping people who work for companies that you’re looking to perhaps get in touch with.

Snapchat: Temporary photos and videos sent to followers’ phones. Create stories.

Periscope: Live streaming, can be integrated into other platforms like Twitter easily.

Reddit: A massive community that covers anything and everything. You share things and comment, upvote and downvote. You need to get to grips with subreddits, though we’d assume you’re looking for /r/write.

Emails: It’s often forgotten, but setting up a mailing list is a vital way to build supportive audiences. You can do this on Mailchimp.

That’s just a dozen or so of the best options to get yourself out there.

So how do I interact across all these platforms?

There are a lot of different ways, so here’s a few overarching rules:

Learn the language. Reddit is full of abbreviations, Twitter and Instagram rammed with hashtags. Know them, use them. #bookstagram and #amwriting are two good places to start.

Don’t push people away with a sales pitch. If someone follows you, they’re interested in some form. Things like auto-DMs going “Thanks for the follow, here’s a link to buy a book” by and large put people off or get ignored. No one wants to follow a sales channel – even if you’re a company, people want some sort of personality or content.

Get a routine. You don’t need to stick to it, but aim for things like a weekly blog or monthly video, 2-3 Instagrams a week – the social media that you don’t use normally, set goals to try keep to them.

Okay, so what should I be using? Well, here’s a guide and some great examples.

Do you want to talk to people?

Twitter is key, conversational, and you can jump on thousands of hashtags to track and take part in chats. Facebook is technically using each post as a mini-forum to track conversations. These two would be the go-to that everyone should have, and will give a direct line of communication with you, and snapshot of what you’re up to.