There are numerous ways to approach your social media marketing strategy regardless of whether you’re promoting your author brand or latest book series, but we know it can be challenging to swap back and forth between your author brain and your marketing brain.
Designed ads are awesome and look great, but how do you know what works for your books? Ultimately it depends on your goals. Are you looking to build your followers? Increase sales? Find new beta readers?
Don’t get too hung up on focusing exclusively on sales. Marketing isn’t just about selling. It’s also about consistency and reliability. Every time someone sees your name or your series title is one more reminder that you have content they might be interested in.
When your time is limited because as an author you need to be writing, it can be hard to know where to start or what to invest your time in. So here’s an easy, fail-safe Facebook advertising tip for generating buzz around your author brand:
Use boosted posts.
On your Professional Dashboard in Meta, you can “boost” a post to give it more visibility. This is essentially turning a regular content post into a paid ad.
Boosted posts have less link tracking options but they’re ideal for growing your following. Increasing your followers gives your author brand more authenticity and trust. The more followers you have, the more people will give your content preference. That also includes social media companies. The algorithms are meant to give precedence to accounts with lots of followers. If your posts get a lot of engagement from followers, it’s more likely that the network will also boost your visibility to non followers who are interested in similar content. Here’s how it’s done:
Step 1: Watch your post insights.
If a recent post is doing well—getting engagement (shares, likes, comments, and clicks) and reach (how many people see it)—then consider turning that post into an ad. Meta will even tell you when a post is doing better than usual. Yes, they want your money and they will suggest a lot of content for you to spend on, but don’t just dismiss their suggestions outright. They want to increase reach and engagement on content they think will do well as much as they want your money to do it. After all, social media platforms are built with the intention of getting the right content to their users.
Step 2: Select a goal.
You could stick with Meta’s Automatic goal setting for ads, but I recommend selecting the “Get more engagement” option especially if you’re starting off.
If your post is about finding ARC readers or reviews, then it may make sense to select the “Get more messages” option if that’s how you want readers to contact you. Either way, let Meta handle the behavioral data analysis so you can get back to writing.
Step 3: Target your audience.
There is a whole science to selecting the right metrics for your ideal book audience, but you don’t have to go deep into data analytics to get there because Meta will do it for you—or at least get you started.
An easy place to start is to go with Facebook’s Smart audience or the Pagelike lookalike option. As your page grows, your audience insights will grow, giving you more data to fine-tune your audience for more targeted marketing campaigns.
Step 4: Set a budget
Obviously budgets are going to be dependent on a lot of factors, but the thing I like about boosted posts is that if you’re willing to play the long game, you don’t need to spend a lot. You’d be amazed what even $10 per boosted post can do if you’re consistent.
However, to keep content from getting stale, I recommend sticking to campaigns that are no more than a week long. It will take about 24–48 hours for a post to gain momentum before Facebook will let you know you should boost it.
A bit about content
I know we all love the NSFW content, but it’s just a matter of legality that social media isn’t going to organically boost NSFW content. Tease your audience but don’t actually show the goods if you want to use ads. Save the super sexy content for your newsletter subscribers.
Paying attention to trends is important to keep you connected to your audience, but look for ways that you can take a trend and make it yours. Make sure it has your style or brand applied to it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but you can always improve on it or make it your own.
What are you waiting for?
Just kidding. There’s no rush for this kind of advertising. It’s not intended to make you go viral or get you to the top of the best sellers list next month. This is the tortoise’s path to successful social media marketing. It’s low-stakes, low-value advertising that takes time to build, but it’s an easy entry into social media marketing for authors with too much on their plates.
The important thing is to test different things and see what works for you. When looking to increase engagement, authenticity goes a long way. If something does well organically, it will do even better if you boost it.
Over time you’ll get a better idea of what kind of posts work for your audience and goals. That will make designated ad campaigns easier to create without spending too much time and money designing ads and testing content.
Morrigan Author Services 