Easily one of the most accessible marketing tools of all time, social media offers unparalleled promotional opportunities. Cost effective and easily focused, social media campaigns can be very successful tools for generating leads. There’s just one catch. You have to build an audience first. Here are six simple ways to get social media followers for your ebook store.
1: Find Out Where They Hang Out
The nature of your ebooks will determine the audience you should seek. This, in turn, will tell you which platforms you should target. Given the wide variety of sites out there, your best result will come from a laser-like approach. In other words, focusing your effort narrowly will give it more impact. The best way to do this is to research your ideal customer persona and follow it to where it lives online.
2: Make Yourself Readily Identifiable
When you establish your profiles on the various platforms, be consistent in your branding. Use your company logo as your profile picture and always include your company name. Run a short, but vivid description of what you’re about, tailored specifically to appeal to your target market. Make sure there’s a trackable link in all of your posts, leading people back to your e-book store. Search engines are now showing social media posts, so always optimize your posts and include relevant keywords in an organic fashion. Research the most relevant hashtags for your offerings and include them to make your posts come up in hashtag searches.
3: Be Gregarious
Promote your store at every opportunity. However do it in a way that is at once relevant, helpful and not sell-fish. Place follow buttons on your website and in your blog posts. If you run traditional ads and/or employ email marketing, make sure those messages feature your follow buttons as well. Cross-promote so your Facebook people look for you on Twitter and vice versa. In addition to your shameless self-promotion exercises, give your existing followers incentives to promote you. This will be one of your most effective tools because people like to see what their friends are into. If that just happens to be you, well—
4: Make Your Posts Interesting, Informative and Delightful
Social media is all about the stories you tell. When you’re learning how to sell ebooks on your own website using social media, find some juicy tidbit your audience will latch onto about a new book or one of your writers. Issue a relevant post referring back to one of your books when huge newsworthy events occur. Passions are inflamed during those periods and people are hungry for every piece of relevant information they can get.
Adhere to the 80/20 rule of social posting. Make 80 percent of your posts engagement oriented and 20 percent of them advertising oriented. The key is to be seen as an authority, rather than somebody looking to make a quick buck slinging ebooks. Keep your posts varied, while staying within the range of your target market’s interests. Variety establishes you as a worldly entity.
Pictures play very well in social media. Posts without pictures typically go ignored. You want to run clever photos capable of eliciting some emotional response. Ooooh, ahhhh, huh, and awww are your best friends in this regard.
5: Remember it’s a Two-Way Street
When your posts attract comments, engage with the audience so they know a real person is on the other end. Ask questions of your commenters. Point them toward other sources of information. Thank people when they compliment you and respond to negative comments right away. To keep an eye on what’s being said about you, set up a Google Alert so you get a note whenever your name is mentioned online.
6: Engage a Social Media Manager
Building a significant social following can take a lot of time if done in a piecemeal fashion. The ideal person for the position is an avid social media user who is adept at creating content, analyzing markets and digesting current events. The job also entails elements of customer service, marketing, and project management.
If you’re thinking you can do all of that and run your store efficiently, you might want to read one of your ebooks on contemporary business management. It requires far more effort than a solo entrepreneur can effectively handle alone. Yes, you can get it started, but as you put these six simple ways to get social media followers for your ebook store into practice, you’ll see it takes quite a bit of time to keep up.