Best Social Media to Use for Publishing

When it comes to publishing and marketing your book, there are many social media platforms you can use. Knowing how to utilize these different platforms is essential if you’re a self-published author. These platforms facilitate authors in various ways and, while some are successful in helping you reach wider audiences easily, others require meticulous planning and a well-thought-out marketing strategy.

In this post, we compare the three biggest social media platforms best for publishing and marketing: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

01. Facebook

Facebook, without doubt, is the largest social media platform, with over 1.4 billion active users daily and nearly 40 million active small business pages across its platform.

And yet, precisely because of this reason, it can be very hard to get discovered on Facebook. The sheer amount of business pages and the daily traffic on the website poses a challenge for self-published authors planning to market their own books. And yet, Facebook does have many features and tools just for this purpose.

While hashtags and keywords are vital elements in any marketing campaign, they’re not as effective on Facebook, because users rarely search for specific hashtags. Therefore it’s important to focus your efforts into engagement with the community. As an author, create a Facebook author profile and build a small fanbase with dedicated and enthusiastic readers. 

02. Instagram

In our previous posts, we have broken down the many different ways of using Instagram for book marketing. Instagram is one of the most popular apps among young people, with over 1.16 billion active monthly users. In fact, Instagram has had the highest growth rate among social media networks over several years, according to a study conducted by the Association of Magazine Media.

Instagram has many features you can use for marketing your book: hashtags, feed and Stories advertisements, and free marketing tools like a breakdown of the demographics of your followers and specific insights on the impressions of your individual posts and Stories.

Instagram’s sponsored Ads allow you to promote your book to your intended audience, regardless of whether they’re following you or not. These free tools (for Business Account Users) are invaluable because it provides information about how users interact with your posts and stories, and helps you understand which type of content they prefer.

03. Twitter

With over 100 million daily users, Twitter is a combination of everything—from the latest news, to arguments with strangers, and meme-sharing. Twitter is the place where you can find all kinds of people. 

But the biggest challenge in using Twitter is knowing how to limit your content to 240-characters and still getting your message across to your followers. With our lives becoming increasingly busy every day, the way we consume information must adapt to keep up with it. This is why Twitter has become so popular: it gives people the ability to digest a lot of news and content within a short span of time. Tweets should be precise and to the point, and enriched with only the relevant information.

When it comes to publishing and book marketing on Twitter, it’s important to keep this in mind if you’re to improve your reach and find your audience. If your tweets are catchy and to the point, they will easily spread to the third circle—beyond your own following.

According to statistics, tweets with images and stunning infographics work best on Twitter, with 18% more click-throughs, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets.

While using hashtags on Twitter helps you in being found by a wider audience, it’s very important to know how to use these hashtags correctly and wisely. Unlike in Instagram—where the more hashtags you use, the better your posts perform—you need to limit the number of hashtags you use on Twitter to a maximum of three. In fact, according to Sendible, engagement drops by 17% when there are 3 or more hashtags in a single tweet.

Knowing the key differences of marketing using these three different sites is vital if you’re to get the maximum use of the tools provided by them.