Should every author use social media to help promote their book/s and their author presence? There are many reasons why using social media is beneficial for the author, especially the self-published author. Here are a few of them.

If you want to increase your author presence, connect with readers and other authors and hopefully sell books, firstly you need to choose the right platform to use. To do this you need to do some research. Find out what social media platform your reader base uses most, look for similar writers and genres of writing on specific sites. This will give you an idea of what platform to use. You need to connect and target the correct audience so finding the appropriate social platform is an important first step.

By targeting just the one social platform it will allow you to focus more of your energy into writing as you will only need to promote and interact on the one site. There is no need to be on multiple sites as this is a waste of your time and energy; concentrate on what you do best which is writing.

Pinterest is a really good option for any writer as you can use this as part of the writing process and can promote with no added effort. You can create a character board, a scene board, or even a board for future book ideas. People will take an interest in this and will learn more about you as an author and your work.

To be on social media is to be active, you need to interact with your followers and fans, and you cannot afford to remain stagnant. It is all about the interaction. It can help you connect with other authors who share a similar interests, publishers, literary agents, and readers. You need to comment on blogs and posts and tweet interesting facts. If someone posts on your wall or tweets you, then you need to respond. Social media is a very personal thing; people want to get to know other people so you too need to share. Do not use it solely to promote your book as this will not work; you need to engage with others so that they become interested in you and then they will promote you.

Google+ is an excellent platform to use to create social groups, groups of authors or a reading group. You can even do web chats via Google Hangouts. This could be used to perform a Q&A session or interview about your upcoming book. It is a fantastic way to interact with other people.

What people like to know is all of the non author things that you share, so for example a particular story that you have read that you’re going to use in your book or you could write a blog post about a particularly disastrous day where nothing went right. People like to know the person behind the book not just the author, so help them to know you a little better.