Welcome to Harmony Publishing, here we are covering a series of blogs on book publishing and especially marketing in Nigeria. If you post your pictures onine, you can post your content too!

SOCIAL MEDIA: CHOOSE IT AND USE IT

Today’s readers use social media to recommend books and connect with other readers. Today’s authors cultivate relationships with bloggers, especially curators whose voices rise above the noise. Ideally, you’ll start marketing and promoting yourself via your website and social media long be-fore your book is available. Twitter and Facebook social sites are popular with many authors because they’re easy to use, enjoy large audiences, and provide one-click connectivity to and from many other social media sites. LinkedIn, another popular social site can help you to reach large groups of professionals in particular industries. Pinterest and Instagram sites are great social visual tools. Google owns Google+ and YouTube, and so when you post there, you enjoy better visibility in the Google search engine. Also, create an online calling and bio at About.me

Authors often worry about which social media platform to use. We recommend registering for all of them, and deciding later: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Gmail addresses and other sites that you discover. Create keyword-rich profiles that point to your website at the very least, and experiment with each one over time to see which you prefer. Twitter is an excellent news commentary and sharing platform providing up-to-the-second information on everything from a concert to a conference, from a war to a sports event. There are a lot of journalists on Twitter, so you have an opportunity to stand out as an expert or a person of interest and get in the news. Connect with and follow other Twitter users as well as sort your tweets by topic of interest using a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite.

Facebook separates personal pages from groups, business and author pages, virtual events, book pages and other kinds of pages. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need a personal page first, then an author page. These pages are linked so that Facebook knows who owns what pages. You can use your Facebook author page to post updates on your writing, alert followers to sales, freebies, interviews and articles, solicit beta readers and run contests. Facebook also makes it easy to embed a button to place on your website so that your readers can “like” your page and see your posts on their Facebook newsfeed. You can also manage

Facebook posts using a tool like HootSuite. Google+ has emerged as a very popular place for writers because it displays long posts so nicely. Because of that, G+ can be used as a blogging platform. (Still, I wouldn’t recommend replacing your blog with a series of G+ posts. Instead, create a short post with a teaser to your new blog post.) Once you add someone to a circle, you can target your posts to show up on the newsfeeds of that circle. Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board that lets you share links by “pinning” an image on one of your boards. (Make sure you place a picture on every page of your website and each blog post so that readers can share via Pinterest.)

Tumblr is a hosted blog tool for visual content. If you’re an author of visual books, note that a significant number of authors have been discovered on this site.

Instagram is a mobile app that lets you post and respond to photos. Linke-dIn is an important platform to use to reach influencers used for making business connections so your profile should be as well written like a resume. Groups in LinkedIn can be

Very profitable places for you to spend your time. Every group has a discus-sions tab where you can start or contribute to a conversation. Use the promotions tab to post information about your seminars, book press releases, awards and news about articles you have written.
Many people use YouTube to search for video content much as they use retail sites to search for products. Videos, especially a short, concise, entertaining, and well-made video, is an excellent marketing tool.

Visual content gets excellent results with readers. Studies show that you’ll get 80% more

Engagement on an image posted on Facebook than a text post, and over 50% more clicks on Twitter. So use pictures to create interest in your posts and also consider incorporating visual elements like infographics or even just inspirational quotes. The online Canva design tool makes creating im-ages very easy. Your mobile device with a built-in camera is your best bet for keeping in real-time contact with your friends, family, and readers. Make sure to add images and infographics on your web pages so that people can share them easily using one of the Pinterest browser buttons.

Ways to use social media effectively

Tell your friends and associates that you just published your book at the available outlet to purchase and to your website. Encourage your fans to buy and review your book
Share useful information.
Be yourself online and offline. It is difficult managing many faces identities. It will not pay any right to be a different person online and different person offline. Participation in online forums like Nairaland can be helpful as a new author. It is a fast way to reach fans and get traffic to your site

Thank you for reading today’s blog on book publishing and marketing. We are here for when you ready to publish your book. Call us on 07032212481 or email publish@harmonypublishing.com.ng.

Our service is available everywhere in Nigeria, and we can deliver worldwide. The service we offer is editing, ghostwriting, book cover, design and interior layout, Printing, ISBN assignment, ebook publishing, soft and hardcover publishing, audiobook publishing, online distribution, indexing, social media marketing.

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