Social media is defined as 'websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.' That means any site which authors will find useful in getting information, sharing information, displaying their books and marketing. That will include sites such as Facebook but also sites such as Goodreads and forums such as Kboards
Let's take a look at various author social media sites and see what they have to offer.
Get as many Facebook friends as possible - interact with them. People you don't interact with are unlikely to see many of your posts. That's the way Facebook works - it won't show you what it thinks you won't be interested in.
Facebook can be an author's friend when it comes to making contacts. Create a page for your books and periodically write about your progress. Facebook is the place for announcing your successes.
- Have you won an award? Use Facebook to tell everyone.
- Got a new book coming out? Tell everyone about it on Facebook.
- Got a problem? Ask for advice on Facebook
- Need to make a decision such as which cover is best? Post the choices on Facebook and ask reader's opinions
Facebook is NOT the place for posting repeated 'Buy my book' adverts. People will quickly de-friend/un-like you.
Facebook adverts work for collecting new readers and subscribers to your email lists. Make an attractive offer and exchange it for an email address. I've yet to meet any fiction author who has earned more than their advertising cost when direct selling fiction.
Tumblr
Tumblr was created in 2007 and has been owned by Yahoo since 2013, It's a social media site on which you can post anything, including quote posts, chat posts, video and photo posts as well as audio posts and short blogs. Like Twitter you can re-post the items of others. The big difference is you are not limited to 140 characters. Unlimited text, images, animated gifs, photosets, audio files, videos, and more are possible. It gives you the flexibility to customize almost everything. Tumbler has about 555 million active users.
LinkedIn is the most popular social media site for professional networking and has over 400 million registered users. LinkedIn is great for people looking to connect with other authors and people in the publishing industry. You'll frequently be bugged with job offers though. This is a great place for support groups and works for non-fiction authors.
Google+
Great for articles and short posts. For authors Its SEO value alone makes it a must-use tool. It had 418 active million users as of December 2015. Blogs using Blogspot will be added to Google+ accounts and it's a great place to announce Google Play books.
YouTube
YouTube is the largest and most popular video-based social media website. It is owned by Google and as such has great SEO value. YouTube has over 1 billion website visitors per month and is the second most popular search engine behind Google. Every author should produce a short video introducing their book and link from it to their website. Consider using MS Powerpoint to do this.YouTube videos get a high priority at Facebook which likes video.
Users can submit content such as direct links and text posts. Users can vote submissions up or down. Submissions with the most positive votes appear in the top category or main page. Reddit had more than 36 million registered accounts and 231 million monthly visitors.
Think author's can't make use of this?
BuzzFeed
At first glance this seems an annoying clickbait site using compelling headlines to attract readers, but look at this post - 'Students Were Forced to Write BuzzFeed Click-bait For Grades. What Happened Next Will Rock Your World!'Think author's can't make use of this?
Quora
A site reminding me of the old Yahoo Answers. It's a place where you can ask questions and provide answers. It's proving very popular and seems a place where you can get information and provide answers. NOT a place to promote but you can link to blogs and of course you have control of what appears at the side of blogs. If you fit Isaac Asimov's statement "Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do," then you'll do well at Quora. Find me there.
StumbleUpon
Stumble upon is a place where you can discover new pages to post on Twitter and other social media sites. You can vote pages up or down and you can discover pages and add them to StumbleUpon. Of course you can Stumble your own blog posts can't you?
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