The only just literary critic is Christ, who admires more than does any man, the gifts He Himself has bestowed. – JRR Tolkien

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Rocking Social Media for Authors

Tips to Manage Social Media for Authors

Social media for authors is fairly easy if you go about it the right way, but don’t be afraid that you’re alone if you’re unsure about how to deal with it.

Just like everything else, it does take some work and practice to get it going, but the rewards can be extremely lucrative.

How to Build, Manage, and Maintain Your Author Social Media

You’re main goal is to build and engage with the correct audience for your books.

With Twitter in particular, you’re going to get lots of authors follow you.

Some is alright because it’s good to collaborate with other authors, but this is not the audience you want.

You want your audience to be the people who will buy your books, so for selling kids books you would want have an audience who is interested in kids/babies/parenting, and not authors promoting being an author.

If you’re genre is kids picture books your audience is parents of children ages 4-8 not authors, and (in this case) not children ages 4-8.

Post content that these people want to read, content that is relevant to them. They don’t want to read content that is about how to publish your kids book, especially not if you want them to buy your kids book.

Read Content Ideas for Your Author Blog for Audience Tips

 

Which Platform?

Everyone wants to know what “the best social media platform” is for them.

The truth is that no social media platform is best for everyone.

The one that’s best for you is the one you like the best and the one you’ll engage and grow your audience the most with. It’s good to have about two platforms that you use regularly, but oftentimes, more than that gets extremely overwhelming and difficult to keep up with.

After all, you need to still be writing your books, so don’t get too caught up on having an account at every social media platform and be spending all your time posting there and spreading yourself too thin.

Social media for authors should be an enjoyable way to engage with your readers and potential readers, not overly difficult or time consuming. You should be having fun – if you’re not having fun – you’re doing it wrong.

Popular social media platforms include:
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn – primarily a business network
Play around with each to see what you enjoy the most and have fun with it!

Author Tips for Social Media

Promote Your Website with Curated Content

A tool that is awesome for curating content and still getting your website link on there is snip.ly When you curate content on social media you are sharing links to other websites that are relevant to your niche or genre. With Snip.ly you can add your link to the bottom of a page with your profile picture, a short message, and link to your website.

So this way you don’t always have to have your own content to post, but you’re still sharing great content while getting your website out there.

Scheduling Content

An ideal way that social media for authors can be less time consuming is when you schedule your posts in advance. You can schedule your content hours, days, weeks, months, and sometimes years, in advance – this can really be a blessing on your time. it’s fantastic to be able to sit down on an off day and walk away with 1-3 month’s worth of content scheduled in just a couple hours.

So, you do want to be be sure you’re posting regularly, something from your website at least each day on social media. It’s ok to post the same link several times, just not all at once. To do this you can use a different image and different wording while posting on different days and different times to get the most out of it.

I use tools like HootSuite for this because I like the auto-scheduling feature. With HootSuite you won’t be allowed to post the exact same message over and over, so you’ll have to change the wording around for each time you post the same link.

On HootSuite you can post to almost every social media network from one account as well, which definitely makes things a lot easier.

But many platforms are now adopting scheduling tools – Facebook – and Instagram through Facebook, and Twitter both have scheduling tools built in.

There are other popular tools such as Buffer.com and SocialOomph.com which are excellent tools as well. All of them have different features and you may want to try using one or two in conjunction to get the most out of social media.

Social Media is all about posting quality content in the right quantity to get the most traffic. Read How Often Should You Post on Social Media? With SocialOomph you have a feature where you can put a post into a regular posting cycle which can be very convenient.

Need Content Ideas – ReadAuthor Marketing Ideas for Social Media.

Managing social media doesn’t have to be difficult when you narrow down what platform is right for you. Then find yourself one or two tools that you love to streamline your content schedule. Don’t let yourself become overwhelmed by social media, which means don’t overdo it.

Do you have any questions about managing social media? If you do, please don’t hesitate to ask, I’m more than happy to help you in any way that I can!

Have a wonderful day!

Galadriel Grace Writing and Editing Tips for Authors and Business

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