One of the tools that authors can use to promote their books is social media. Indie authors in particular have a lot riding on social media to tell people about their books. If an indie author joins social media websites during the day of a book launch, the author is already too late and it is a difficult task to play catch-up. Any author should have a social media strategy several years before publishing books. To use social media effectively, you have to put out great content and engage readers frequently so that they will be interested when you finally release a book. Your loyal followers will buy your book and help you spread the word.

Every author who wants to be successful should build a credible presence in social media. It doesn’t matter whether the author is self-published or traditionally published. There are two social media platforms that authors should concentrate on if they want to build a following and they are Facebook and Twitter. To promote themselves, authors can use platforms such as Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Let’s take a look at how an author can use Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter can be an intimidating place for authors to establish themselves but it can be a great tool once they learn how to use it. Authors should use social media to promote themselves and not just their latest books. Any book that an author writes is inevitably tied to the author as a person. In a way, therefore, the author is his/her own brand and books are just products of the brand. If an author spends a year tweeting a countdown to his/her next book, he will have few followers remaining at the launch date and they will probably be bored and ready to leave.

Authors who want to use Twitter to market books should start by following people who have an interest in books, book bloggers, other writers, librarians, journalists, book reviewers, etc. Such people can be found using keyword searches. The more people you follow, the higher the chances of some of them following you back. You become more visible on Twitter as you follow more people.

As an author, you should never pester people on Twitter about your book. Mentioning people and companies without good reason is considered spamming and it is one of the quickest ways to lose followers. You should always tweet about interesting content that people can comment on or retweet. You should see the type of comments that interest people most and use them to model subsequent content.

Facebook

Every author should create a Facebook fan page as part of his/her social media strategy. However, for a long-term strategy, you should consider creating an author page instead of a fan page which deals with a single book. An author page can enable you and other people to post about all your endeavors for years to come. If you create a fan page for one book, it will get visitors once the book is released but people will quickly lose interest in the page as the book gets older.