Author—Should you be Using Social Media?

The answer is a simple—Yes—but which social media sites? Come to think of it, what exactly is meant by an author social media website?
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.

Facebook

The largest social networking site in the world and widely used. Using it you can network with 'friends' and relatives, and also access various writer's groups where you can ask questions. You can even market or promote your books by using paid Facebook ads. As of September 2016 Facebook had approximately 1.71 billion active users. It is estimated that more than 1 million small and medium-sized businesses use the platform to advertise their business.
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.

Pinterest

Pinterest is primarily for images and video. Of course as an author, you will be posting images of your book covers and possibly of images relevant to it. More than half of its visitors are women; could that mean it's a good site to promote romance? I post the pictures which I use in advertising, especially those using humour. People seem to like those.

X / Twitter

A site which limits your text to 280 characters to which you can add a URL and image. By paying a small monthly fee you can increase your post limit to 500 characters and make use of italic and bold text. You also get a blue check mark next to your name indicating the account is validated. X has lost it's key position though since it was taken over and rebranded as 'X'. It has more than 320 million active monthly users who make use of the 280 character limit to pass on information. Authors can use Twitter to interact with readers, answer questions, release latest news and advertise books.  The one thing you must NOT do is to post a constant stream of 'Buy my book' posts. You will quickly be unfollowed if you do. Post a mixture of  video, images, how to..., quotes, interest items, and mix in no more than 15% of promotions. Re-tweet interesting posts by others and comment. DON'T follow everyone who follows you—vet them first. Don't expect miracles; Twitter will have little effect until you have at least 10,000 followers. NEVER buy followers—these are useless. Learn how to create the perfect Twitter profile.

LinkedIn

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+

Google+ was discontinued in 2019. It was great for articles and short posts. For authors, its SEO value alone made it a must-use tool. It had 418 active million users as of December 2015. Blogs using Blogspot were added to Google+ accounts and it was a great place to announce Google Play books.

Now the link takes you to an update page for Google Chat.

Is there an alternative? You might try Google Chat but for SEO I recommend Blogger which is Google's blogging site (this post is there). Bloggs posted on Blogger are immediately picked up by the Google search engine.

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.

Instagram

Instagram is a visual social media platform. It has more than 400 million active users and is owned by Facebook. Many of its users use it to post information about travel, fashion, food, art and, of course, books. Almost 95 percent of Instagram users also use Facebook.

Reddit

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.

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?