Creating Effective Social Media Posts for Your Books


Social media can be a fun, creative way to engage with readers, network with peers, and market your books. When you interact with others on social media, you want to create posts that stand out and make people want to comment and/or share the post. 

Growing your social media follower count can be exciting and useful. However, the number of followers you have is less important than how many people regularly interact with your posts. Focus on creating engaging content so that people are excited to follow you both on and off social media. 

As you build your online friendships, you’ll be able to convert followers to fans by inviting them off of social media to engage with your other valuable content via more direct, reliable communication like email.

The 5 Keys to Great Social Media Posts

1)   Audience

The most important part of any social media post is your audience. Who are you talking to? Who do you want to be talking to? 

Social media networks are central hubs for various communities. As an author, you’ll seek out both readers and publishing industry peers in these communities. Each community talks about different topics, digs deep into major issues, and celebrates each other’s successes. 

With each social media network, you’ll want to find the communities you want to be a part of and then create content that they love. On some networks, you may just chat with your fellow authors and illustrators. On others, you’ll interact with both peers and readers. 

It’s vital to know who you are talking to on social media because you want to create posts that they will engage with. 

If you only share content about you and your book without considering whether other people will care about it, you’ll find social media to be a rather lonely place. You don’t want to be standing outside the party watching everyone have fun without you. 

Don’t expect them to instantly find you charming and fall in love with your social media posts. Kickstart those relationships by taking the time to engage with them first. Get to know what your peers and readers enjoy to gather ideas for your own posts. Follow your peers and reader influencers. Show them support by commenting and sharing their posts. As you create these relationships, you are expanding the number of people you can potentially reach when your book comes out.

2)   Purpose

Always start with your goal. Before you begin a tweet or post, you want a clear purpose for why you are going to post. 

Is it to offer valuable resources to your peers? To excite readers before your book release? 

The time you spend on social media should be focused on two main goals: First, building and maintaining relationships with your peers, book influencers, other industry professionals, and readers. Second, creating social media posts that inform, educate, or entertain your followers so that they want to share that awesome post with their followers… thus growing your audience.  

Even posts that are intended to simply make someone laugh about a funny thing that happened to you while writing your story have a purpose: To entertain a very specific audience. 

To avoid wasting a few hours on content that doesn’t add value to your online presence, make sure every post has a purpose. Your overall purpose is to create interesting, shareable content that will drive followers to be interested in getting more great content from you, which will lead them to your books.

Don’t throw up a picture of a sunset, caption it beautiful, and call it a day. I mean, of course you can. However, you need to have a clear understanding of how that post achieves your overall goal. 

Your post could simply be an exercise in creativity. That can be reason enough to create it. But by being clear with yourself about what the purpose is before you post it, you can better judge its success.

3)   Content

Social media is an art form. It takes creativity, experimentation, and knowing your audience to create great posts that followers will love and share. But, it’s also a science. You can’t just throw random or boring content online and assume people will be inspired to buy your books.

You need to pay attention to what content your audience likes and why. This is the content they will interact with, comment on, and share with others. Make your content valuable to your readers and peers.

Content that provides value to your audience typically falls into one of these three categories: educational, informative, and/or entertaining. 

3)   Content 

The text should speak directly to your audience. You will spend some time talking about yourself and your book, but you also want to cater to their interests and engage them around the topics they enjoy. 

Try to keep most of those topics closely related to your stories or brand. Everything you post shows a different aspect of you and therefore of your author brand. The more you can create a few central themes to your content, the easier it will be to build up an audience. They will be able to look at your content and see that the type of value you provide lines up with the content they want.

To build trust, you want to spend 80% of your time adding value to the community through engaging with others and 20% on talking about your book.

Here are some types of content you could use to educate, inform, and/or entertain your audience:

  • Share the behind-the-scenes of your life as a writer. This includes your writing process, passion for books, and inspiration for your stories.
  • Share interesting research that came up while you were writing your story.
  • Share deleted or altered scenes to show them more of the story than what’s in the book.
  • Show yourself. Include occasional photos of you engaging in the professional book world. This not only shows agents, editors, awards committees, etc that you are a serious author and/or illustrator, it also shows your audience what your job is like. Are you a teacher or speaker? Use photos taken at your workshops or events to show how you engage with your audience. 
  • Share useful book-related news about the industry with your peers. 
  • Any time you post a photo, share the story behind the picture. How did the image inspire you? Your caption can be directly related to the image or not. It can be one sentence or a couple of paragraphs. Just think of your followers. Will they look at the image and immediately understand why you posted it? How can you make your intent clearer?
  • Take a look at other writers, illustrators, and entertainers who share your interests and follow them. Pay attention to what they are posting and how they post it. What do you like about it? What does it inspire you to post about?
  • Engage your followers by asking a question. Gather their opinions and ideas. You can solicit ideas for what to call the ice cream shop in your latest story or even ask them  where you should go on your book tour.

Finally, some posts should contain a call-to-action (CTA). This is a statement or question that is designed to get an immediate response. On social media, this is often a question. “Has anyone else experienced…?” “What should I do about…?” But, it can also be an invitation for the reader to click a link, answer a poll, or do any other task. It’s a fantastic tool for encouraging readers to engage at a higher level than just clicking “like.”

4)   Images

The best performing social media posts contain images. This is because in a long, continuous news feed, images can stand out more so that we pause to view them. 

Posts with images receive more engagement than text posts. According to Buffer, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.

Additionally, images help us to better remember the content of the post. 

“When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retain 65% of the information three days later.”  - Dr. John J. Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, author of Brain Rules

Looking at the hierarchy of posts types:  

Video > Animated Image (gifs)  > Image > Link > Text posts

Video outperforms all other types of content. Moving images grab your attention. Static images are tried and true content. When posting links, the website typically pulls up a preview image to help it stand out. Text posts without images tend to get the least amount of engagement, usually because they don’t stand out in your newsfeed.

So, you want to incorporate images, gifs, or videos into more of your posts in order to help your audience see them easily and encourage them to share the content.

5)   Hashtags

Hashtags can be a very useful tool for finding and connecting with your communities online. They allow you to easily find people with your shared interests. 

On Twitter, you can use specific hashtags to participate in conversations with communities of writers, illustrators, publishing professionals, and readers. On Instagram, your series of hashtags on a post can identify the content for potential followers. 

With those and other social media networks, hashtags make your content inherently searchable. If readers are looking for content about #YAfantasy2019 they can search through that tag. Hashtags can help the social media network’s algorithm to tailor an individual’s newsfeed to better suit their tastes. 

When trying to figure out which hashtags to use to engage with readers, first take a look at the hashtags used by the authors and/or illustrators of books in your category and genre. You want to use ones that are relevant to the photo and caption but are also relevant to the community who will be interested in that post. They are already actively engaging with those readers, so you can learn from them.

Since one of social media’s main uses is to connect with others in your community, you can also use hashtags to network and make friends. You can find members of organizations like the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (#scbwi), Romance Writers of America (RWA), or Mystery Writers of America (MWA). You can engage through shared projects or goals like #Inktober for illustrators or #NaNoWriMo for writers.

How many hashtags should you use? That depends on which social media network you are using. Twitter and Facebook work best with only 1-3 hashtags. Studies show that Instagram posts with 11 or more hashtags get the best engagement. 

Choosing the right hashtags depends on your goal and your audience. Try to stay away from one word hashtags that are too generic and don’t add to the content of the post. For example, “My #book is on #sale now!” doesn’t help us to better find your post or see how it fits into our interests. Book and sale are too generic of terms in this case. 

More specific hashtags make your content easier to search. They also tell the audience more information about the content. When you’re only using 1-3 hashtags, you want to use the most specific ones you can. For example, you might tag a tweet #PBchat to talk to other picture book writers and illustrators. 

However, when you’re using multiple hashtags—like with Instagram or Pinterest—you want to include a mix of tags. Start with 2-3 popular, more generic hashtags. Then, add more specific hashtags that hone in on your community and audience. For example: 




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