You’ve written the book, set up your social media, created your website and put yourself out into the world of being a published author – but do you have a marketing strategy for how to promote your book on social media?

How do you know you’re connecting with readers?

There’s the more obvious ways of course, your book sells copies and you have people following you on social media, that can be enough for some authors to see that people are interested.

Social media can also be time consuming. You may have already looked at tools which allow you to schedule posts in advance, but many of them can be confusing and they don’t always give you the information you need to know when is the best time to post on which platform.

Guessing which particular platform will work best for your brand isn’t difficult, each one meets a different need and targets a different type of target audience persona (which is why it pays to write unique content for each social media channel you use).

But wouldn’t it be even better if you could accurately track and measure the true value of your marketing strategy and how you promote your book on social media efforts?

 

 

How Veracity Can Help You

With Veracity’s unique individual post tracking capabilities you can discover the real value of your marketing strategy and how you promote your book on social media through seeing which posts on which platform are gaining the most engagement.

Veracity also identifies posts which may not have received any engagement but which have still delivered visitors to your website – thereby giving you greater control on how you promote your book and letting you see the visible effects of  your efforts.

With Veracity you can create tracked links to measure your marketing, as well as manage your campaigns. It also gives you website analytics for each link – telling you how your website visitors behave after they click the link. Veracity shortlinks work on any social platform (yes, even Instagram) and you can use them with any social media management tool, like Hootsuite or Buffer.

 

Engaging With Your Readers

As we wrote in a previous blog – you have 15 seconds to capture someone’s attention when they land on your website. With an author it’s a slightly easier challenge to keep your visitors engaged as they are often:

 

• Already a fan looking for more information
• Have found you via your social channels
• Have been recommended your books by a friend
• Already follow you on social media

Engage with these types of visitor by having a well designed website where people can find out more about you as an author and your books (and make sure to include buy links to all major retail sites if you publish on more than just Amazon’s Kindle program).

 

Photo by Karim Ghantous on Unsplash

 

Simple Tips On How To Promote Your Book

There’s many ways to use social media in your marketing strategy as a self-published author even without the backing of a big publishers publicity department. Here’s five of our favourites:

 

1. Share Your Love for Writing – Tell your readers why you do what you do. Give them an insight into your writing and what inspires you. It helps readers feel a connection.
2. Share The Books You Love – You don’t always have to be promoting yourself. Share books you’ve enjoyed, join forces with other indie authors to help promote each other’s books, talk about what you look for in a good book.
3. Say Thank You – Whenever someone does something good, thank them for it. A shout out on social media goes a long way to building up goodwill among readers. If they offer a good service, tell your readers why you love working with them.
4. Run an Q&A – Ask readers to submit questions and then answer the ones you want to give details on. You can restrict questions (i.e. no real life information) if you wish. Or ask readers to submit questions for your characters to answer.
5. Be Visual – Share your cast ideas for the characters in your book. Share photos of your workspace or things which inspire you.

And once you’ve done these, use Veracity to check out which had the highest engagement on the social media platforms you use and then check the unique KPIs for each social post to fine tweak your ongoing efforts.

Post by post, the analytics can be drilled down into to see which social channel sent the most traffic to a page. Lower Bounce rates, higher page views per visit and higher times on site all indicate greater engagement and a more successful post.