In Part One of this two-part series, we talked about three strategies authors can use to maximize their social media marketing efforts—ways to create sites that are engaging, informative, and collaborative. Social media is a clever way to publicize a book, to create buzz for book-related events, such as signings and speaking engagements, and to position yourself as an expert in a your given field. Obviously, the end goal is increased book sales.
Let’s look at three more ways to enhance your professional brand using social media marketing.
Don’t Just Stay on Your Own Social Media Page
Savvy social media marketers and online community managers know that one can’t just “stay at home” and never come out of one’s own house. That would be “anti-social media.” On Facebook, for instance, an author should spend time on other people’s pages—commenting, liking, and sharing what they post.
Peruse the social media pages of people you like and admire, people who are influencers and thought leaders in your field of expertise. Search to find groups, organizations, companies, and events posted on social media that are related to your book topic. Place thoughtful and interesting comments on others’ posts, and they will start to notice you and reciprocate.
Know YOUR Desired Audience
As an author, you have a main audience—and then you have additional sub-segments you can drill down into. Take out that legal pad and start brainstorming. Draw a box in the center where you identify the obvious type of potential reader. For example, let’s say you’re a career author who has written a book about job interviewing skills. Your obvious audience would be recent grads. From there, you might start branching out with lines connected to other boxes in which you define smaller audience segments: parents of recent grads, people in midlife starting encore careers, HR managers who do the interviewing, college career counselors, and so on.
Continue this brainstorming with smart friends or family members. You should end up with a sketch of a little solar system; your main audience is the sun in the center, and the planet circles are filled with descriptions of the additional types of people you want to connect with on social media. From there, the next step is to determine where they are on social, what platform they might tend to be more active on. Find them, follow them, connect with them.
Create an Exciting Sales Funnel for Them
Hopefully, there should be a number of touch points in the your sales funnel—someone might hear you being interviewed on the radio or read an article about the book, then subsequently they might Google you or the book name. They will also try to check you out on social media. Everything you do to market yourself and the book can be touch points along the way to potential book sales.
If you make your social media marketing fun, interesting, provocative, and collaborative, people who become interested are more likely to go to your website, Amazon, or the publisher’s site to find out more about the book. This may transpire over a period of days, perhaps weeks. Along the way, you should be involving them in a swirl of social conversation that will eventually motivate them to buy your book.