How Can I Use Social Media to Promote My Book?
May 12, 2021Pick Your Platform(s)
Do not try to be everything for everyone. I've found that Instgaram, Facebook and LinkedIn work best for book promotion, though I know people who swear by Pintrest (links to that below).
Instagram: Top Tips
Use Canva. The easiest thing to do is to take quotes from your book and make them into Instagram posts on Canva; use the same font and the same color as your book cover and short ones are going to work the best.
Put multiple links in your bio. Use LinkTree or another platform that allows you to put multiple links in your bio because links are not clickable in Instagram captions and you only get space for one link in your bio. If you use something like LinkTree, you can link to your Amazon page, to a book page on your website, to media interviews and other things that you're doing for your book.
Tag other people. Don't abuse that by tagging strangers all the time because it's annoying, but do tag other people that you want to see and ideally like and comment on your post.
Encourage interaction. You can always urge people to take action by writing something like "give a heart if you agree" or "tag a friend who needs to hear this." When people comment on your posts, comment back. When they like your post, go and like some of their photos.
Encourage people to save your posts. Apparently, the Instagram algorithm loves it when people save posts. So if you are posting a quote that is teaching something useful, why not encourage your followers to save it?
Post multiple photos in a series. Instagram also loves carousels—having a series of photos in a sequence, which keeps people on your post.
Put excerpts from your book as captions. You have 2200 characters on Instagram, so you can definitely take excerpts from your book and paste them. See below for a link to a website that makes your captions have pretty paragraph breaks because if you just paste paragraphs into your captions, the layout is pretty ugly.
Do Stories. If you have over 10,000 followers you can do stories that say swipe up and you can put a link. If you don't have 10,000 followers, still do stories. I recently heard an Instagram expert say that if you really want your audience to fall in love with you, do 10 stories a day but dear God that's a lot of stories.
Do Reels. Reels are all the rage and I'll link below to an expert who teaches about Reels. A lot of people do Reels videos where they're pointing different words. I even did one before I realized I think we all look ridiculous doing that. Lately I've been experimenting with making funny Reels that don't actually teach anything.
Post reviews. You can post screen grabs of people's reviews of your book. You can grab the screen grabs from Amazon and post them or you can take little bits from them and make them into quote cards on Canva.
Post cool graphics of your book cover. I recommend using a site called Adazing because it can make your book cover into really cool graphics—it can create an image of your book cover on a tablet or show a cat with your book. (I'm actually an affiliate for them so you can get this SUPER AWESOME DEAL if you click here or at the link in the Useful Links section)
Use Instagram Live. Go onto Instagram Live and talk about your book, possibly doing interviews with other people about your book. Or even better, go on an Instagram tour. We had a client who spent a month after her book release doing Instagram takeovers, where she took over literally the friend's account. She just introduced herself to that person's audience and talked about her book and it was really effective.
Use hashtags. Hashtags are, like it or not, important. You can use up to 30 hashtags in a single post and the most effective way to use them is to come up with a list of ones that are relevant for your content and then search Instagram to see which of those are the most popular. Your goal is to rank in the top post for that hashtag so if that hashtag is used millions of times, it's going to be impossible to rank high. So you're looking for hashtags that are used hundreds of thousands of times or less, depending on how many followers you have. I'm linking below to a class on hashtags that breaks this process down.
I got my very first client because he was searching hashtags. This was back when I posted a lot about addiction and recovery; he was searching like recovery hashtags. He found me, he came to me and said, "I would like you to write and publish my book." Instagram may feel like just an ode to our vanity but I've gotten plenty of clients from it.
Facebook: Top Tips
Change your main images. I recommend changing your Facebook cover, your Twitter cover, your LinkedIn cover, your YouTube cover and any other cover you have to an image that includes your book cover.
Take advantage of the opportunity to pin posts. Make a link to your book sales page a pinned post on Facebook and also on Twitter and in your email. Put it everywhere you can.
Create a Facebook public page. Don't be self-conscious about calling yourself a public figure. A public page is not going to have this same reach as a personal page because Facebook just doesn't prioritize the public page in terms of the algorithm, but it's something that professional writers should have.
Share personal stories, photos and long captions. On Facebook, the posts that are going to perform the best are personal stories related to your book. People love stories of triumph. They love stories of success, and they love photos. Facebook really wants to keep you on and everybody else on Facebook, so links that take them out of Facebook are not going to perform as well. Longer posts are better.
Run Likes campaigns. To get people onto your Facebook public page, you can run Likes campaigns. Facebook advertising is pretty complicated but running Likes campaigns is the easiest kind of Facebook advertising to do.
Invite people to Like your page. Whenever somebody likes one of your posts on Facebook, you can then invite them to like your page and you will over time build up the number of followers on that page.
LinkedIn Tip
LinkedIn is definitely the more professional of all of these. So I recommend, if your book is about something where you're teaching something, if there's anything relevant for people who are interested in building their business in any way, that's what you post on LinkedIn. Hashtags are also are important there.
Finally, Don't Be Afraid to DM
When your book comes out, you can direct message people on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. I've DM'd people videos of me saying, "Hey, my book comes out tomorrow. It would mean so much if you would go and get it." You can do voice notes, whatever you can do to get people excited.
It's really easy to assume, "Hey, if I post this, everybody's going to know to go get my book." You'd be amazed how much more likely people are to do something if you ask them directly to do it.
HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:
→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book
→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book
→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)
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QUOTE OF THE POD:
"It's really easy to assume, 'Hey, if I post this, everybody's going to know to go get my book.' You'd be amazed how much more likely people are to do something if you ask them directly to do it. "
