The entire world relies immensely on social media to build brands and connect with world. Of late, social media has become the platform for writers and authors to promote their books, interact with readers, and create a buzz for their new ventures. There are a lot of popular authors active on social media and many of them are doing it right when it comes to marketing their books. And as far as new writers are concerned, many tend to go about promoting their books online after reading some blogs on tips, tricks, and techniques on book marketing. While it is essential to know the best practices of online book promotions, it is equally important to know the don’ts of online book marketing. Here, we offer you some crucial social media marketing mistakes you should avoid when promoting your book.

Being Omnipresent too Soon

The anxiety to promote your book as soon as it gets published is always high and driven by it, a lot of authors tend to open a profile for their book on all the social media platforms. Personally, I’ve seen first-time authors making a list of social media platforms to be present on to promote their books. Apart from Facebook and Twitter, they aim to make the best of messengers like WhatsApp and Hike and even platforms like Snapchat or anything that trends at a period of time. When you’re socially omnipresent, you tend to leverage only half or even lesser potential of what each platform is capable of. The best thing to do will be to go live on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and work on coming up with best strategies to engage target audiences there. Also, when you’re on too many platforms, it becomes too difficult for you to handle the profiles and responses, making you appear less active online. Initially, use just the three major platforms and establish a solid presence. Later, use your following on them to redirect traffic to any new profile that you set up.

Creating Less number of Value Content

One of the most effective ways to connect with people and spread word about you and your book is by creating and sharing value content. By value content, we mean any form of content that provides quality information about your niche to your target audience. What it also means is refraining from promoting your brand too much. Have you seen some pages or campaigns that post content only about their brand? Annoying, right?

When you set out to promote your book online, follow the 70-30 rule. Keep the promotions of your book to 30% and use the remaining 70% to share and engage people with interesting content on your niche (not your brand). It could be an interesting blog post, any industry updates, a funny meme, a video, podcast, or anything that people will find it useful and engaging. Avoid being narcissistic online and you’ll see a lot of people following you. Also, this brings us to another important concept called spamming. Even when you follow this 70-30 rule, ensure you don’t keep posting content several times a day and flood the walls of your followers. Have a content calendar and share or post one piece of useful content a day consistently. Also, it’s okay to skip a day or two in between.

Failing to Respond

When your 70-30 rule works, you can see a lot of people sending you messages or commenting on your posts. As an author looking to increasing your persona, you need to pay heed to their responses. Comment back, acknowledge, come up with a quirky response, like them, and do whatever it takes to make the engagement alive. By doing so, you gain credibility among your followers and you get the chance to connect with new people, too. When you fail to respond, you will appear as a robot, who has scheduled your posts. So talk to your people and give them your attention because you will receive theirs when your book hits the shelf. Focus on building valuable relationships.

Poor Language

You’re a writer and your language online reflects that of your book. When people find errors on your post, they immediately suspect your skill as a writer and look down upon your book as well. Plus, in these days, there are a lot of trolls and disguised attention seekers out there, who are on the constant lookout for faults to comment on them. So, always proofread your content before you post them, regardless of whether it is an 800-word blog post or a two-line status update. An error-free post cannot make your career but the one with errors can surely break it. Stay warned.

Failing to Measure Results

Apart from just keep sharing posts and responding to comments and messages, you should see if your strategy is working and that you’re reaching your goal as well. You should analyze and measure the performance from all aspects of your promotions such as the number of clicks per post, the engagement of your content in terms of comments and shares, tagging of people on your comments, ROI per boosted promotions, performance of posts based on hashtags, the reach of your posts, conversion ratios, and more. Only if you assess your posts for performance that you’ll know if your campaign is on track and will help you understand the steps you need to take your strategies better. Assessing will also give you insights on the right keywords you can use and the target audience you can vary for better reach. Keep posting content blindly and you’ll start losing on the engagement quotient and followers.

And these

• When you share links, shorten them using websites and then post them. It may seem trivial but lengthy links tend to annoy people,
• Once you start posting, make sure you don’t become inconsistent in sharing content.
• Not using a hashtag when you post content or using the wrong ones both will not compliment your promotions. To know about using the right hashtags, click here.
• If you’re planning to get followers by paying or if you want some fake followers to make your page look extravagant, stop your thoughts right there. We want organic traffic of quality followers who will anticipate and respond to your posts.
• Starting social media marketing without a plan and a budget and not knowing who your target audience are other two blunders you need to be careful about.

Though social media marketing of books is all about experimenting new things online, these are some of the strict no-nos. Now, go back to your social media marketing plan and see if you’re making any of the mistakes we’ve covered. Share the post to let others assess if they’ve been making these errors as well.