What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing means using platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok to promote what you sell. You do it with your own posts, which cost nothing to publish, and with paid social media advertising. Paid ads put your message in front of people who don't follow you yet. If you've just written a crime novel, that could mean posting quotes from it for your followers and paying for an ad aimed at fans of similar books.

You decide who your ads target, and you can track how people respond to every post. Because people can reply to you, you also talk to customers directly, and over time that builds brand recognition.

Should you start with organic posts or paid social media advertising?

For most small businesses, organic posts are the better place to start. Organic posts are what you publish on your own profiles. For your book, that could be an image of the cover with a line from a review, or a short video of you reading a passage. A poll that lets readers pick the cover works too. This kind of social media promotion costs nothing but your time. Results build slowly, though, and depend on posting regularly over months. We'd suggest a few posts a week that you can keep up, rather than a burst of daily posts that stops after a fortnight.

With paid social media advertising, you pay the platform to show your post or ad to an audience you choose, such as readers of crime fiction. What you spend depends on the budget you set and how long the ads run. So you can start with a small budget and raise it once you see what works.

Our advice: wait until you can see which of your posts get comments and shares. Then pay to promote those to a wider audience, so your first ad budget goes on something you already know works.

Types of social media ads

Social media ads come in a handful of common formats, and each platform adds its own variations:

• Image ads: a single picture with your message on it, such as your book cover beside a line from a good review.
• Video ads: a short piece of video content, for example a clip of you reading the opening page of your book.
• Carousel ads: several images or videos that people swipe through like a slideshow, one card at a time. You can tell a story in steps, with one character on each card.
• Story ads: vertical, full-screen ads that appear between people's Stories, the short posts they tap through on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
• Shopping ads: ads that show your products and take people straight to where they can buy them. For your book, that could be the pre-order page on fernhollowbooks.co.uk.
• Lead ads: ads with a form that people fill in and send to you, such as LinkedIn's lead forms. For your book, that could be a sign-up for your author newsletter.

Building a community around your brand

Social media works both ways. People can comment, ask questions and share your posts, and you can answer them in public. Reply to comments, ask readers which character they'd like to hear more about, or share a photo a reader posted of your book. Each of these gives people a reason to come back.

That kind of attention builds loyalty and brand trust. Readers who feel heard can become loyal fans who buy the next book and recommend it to friends.

What is a social media campaign?

A social media campaign is a marketing campaign run on social media, with a series of posts and ads on one or more platforms. Unlike your everyday posts, a campaign has an end date and one result to aim for, such as pre-orders before launch day.

A launch campaign for your new book could include:

• Teaser posts that build interest in the book, each linking to the pre-order page on fernhollowbooks.co.uk.
• A giveaway of signed copies, which gets people commenting and sharing.
• Paid ads aimed at readers of similar crime novels.
• A live Q&A on launch day, where readers put their questions to you directly.

Set the goal and the end date before you start, so you can tell afterwards whether the campaign worked.

How to build a social media marketing strategy

Without a plan, social media for business easily turns into posting whenever you remember. Build your plan in this order, because each step uses what the one before it found out:

1. Set goals you can measure, such as more pre-orders or more visits to your website, and a date to reach each one by.
2. Work out who your target audience is and what they want to see, so you post things they respond to. A few personas, short profiles of your typical readers, make this easier.
3. Look at what your competitors post, such as other crime writers, and at what works well for them and what doesn't.
4. Decide which one or two platforms to focus on first, choosing the ones where your typical readers and the authors from step 3 are most active. Then set up your profiles there, or improve the ones you already have.
5. Plan a content calendar with the dates and times you'll post each type of content on each platform.
6. Check your results regularly and adjust your plan to do more of what works.

If your website is built with Aida AI Website Builder, Aida AI can help you share content directly to your social media channels. This makes it easy to publish across multiple platforms and reach a wider audience with less manual work.

Measuring social media success

Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have built-in analytics that show whether your posts are working. Start with these four numbers:

• Engagement, the likes, comments and shares that tell you which posts about your book people respond to.
• Your audience, meaning who sees your posts and follows your account, for example by age or location.
• Follower growth, or how quickly your following grows from month to month.
• Conversions, the visitors from your posts who go on to pre-order the book or sign up on your website.

Compare each number with the goals you set in step 1. If plenty of people click through to fernhollowbooks.co.uk but few pre-order, work on the website to boost your conversions. Because results build slowly with regular posting, judge your plan on the trend over a few months, not on one post that does badly.

Common questions about social media marketing

Do you need a website for social media marketing?

No, you can start on the platforms alone. But your followers live on platforms you don't control. A website such as fernhollowbooks.co.uk is the one place you control yourself, where your posts and ads can send people to pre-order the book or sign up for news.

How is social media marketing different from digital marketing?

Social media is one channel of digital marketing. Digital marketing, also called online marketing, covers every online channel, from search engine optimisation and email to social media and other websites. When you use digital and social media marketing together, it's worth letting every channel send people to the same website.

Start planning your posts

With your goals set and your platforms chosen, write your first week of posts for the launch.

Scheduling your posts ahead of time keeps your posting regular without you having to sit down and do it every day. With our social media tool SocialPilot, you can put your posts on a calendar and publish them to multiple accounts in one go.

Plan a whole week or month of posts in SocialPilot and let them go out automatically.