Author: Book Marketing Tools / Source: bookmarketingtools.com There’s something you need to understand right up front: your social media
There’s something you need to understand right up front: your social media book launch campaign is not your broader marketing or social media strategy.
Instead, and much like your book launch plan, your social media campaign and tactical plan are derived from these big-picture strategies. This is a one-off, short-term plan that focuses on completing specific activities within a specified timeframe in order to achieve short-term goals.
Before you begin, you should have a clear idea of who you’re targeting, what your goals are, and the message you want to convey during your book launch. If you haven’t identified these things yet, you should do so now as they will be vital to the success of your book launch. When you have that information at hand, start planning the what, why, and how of your social media book launch campaign.
Step 1: Set Clearly Defined Campaign Goals and Metrics
Think about your book launch marketing plan goals and objectives for a minute. How can your social efforts tie into that?
For example, if one of your overarching goals is to increase your credibility as an author, and one of your objectives for that is to participate in interviews with prominent journalists, podcast hosts, and bloggers, then you might want to use social media as an outreach tool to connect with key people and start building relationships. If your objective is to generate reviews, you could create engaging and action-driven posts that encourage fans and followers to make their opinion known on sites like Amazon and Goodreads.
If an overarching goal is to grow your email list, and one of your objectives is to generate a certain number of unique subscribers with a relevant opt-in offer, you can easily create social media content promoting your freebie. In fact, Facebook now provides a special free feature for Fan Pages called Facebook Offers. These posts look different from the others, so they’re sure to capture attention.
Here’s a quick tutorial:
On your Facebook Page, click “Create an offer.”
Fill in the details for your offer. Make sure you change the offer type to “Free Stuff,” add the URL to the dedicated landing page that hosts your signup form, create a compelling title and description, add an expiration date, and upload an engaging, eye-catching image of your incentive. When you’re done, click the blue “Create Offer” button to publish the post to your Timeline.
Below is what your post will then look like. You can see it’s very different to regular Facebook posts and contains a prominent call-to-action button. Consider pinning it to the top of your Timeline for the duration of your launch so that it’s front and center for all your Page visitors to see.
Along with setting your social media campaign goals, you should determine which metrics you’ll track. This could include factors like reach, engagement (such as shares, comments, retweets, likes, and reactions), follower numbers, how many people got your offer, and more. The good news is that most social media platforms now have built-in analytics. This will give you a deeper insight into the type of content your followers love so that you can: 1) create more of it and 2) be strategic about how you use your channels and when you post content.
Step 2: Choose Which Networks You’ll Use
You might feel the need to go in all guns blazing, but that’s not necessarily the most effective use of your time or resources. Your decision to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, Goodreads, or any one of the other popular networking sites will not only depend on your campaign goals, but it’ll also depend on where your target audience congregates online. Concentrating your efforts on sites that are best for you, your readers, and your book will likely end in better results and more time to implement other highly effective tactics.
If you are finding it difficult to choose a social platform, then start with Facebook….
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