Nowadays, if you want to be successful as an author, you need to do more than just write. You need to have a regular way to continuously put yourself out there. Marketing your book, promoting your blog, and growing valuable relationships with your audience are all elements your business plan needs. In addition, you need an efficient and effective way to communicate with your target audience.
Facebook, aside from being used by hundreds of millions of monthly users, is the type of tool that allows you to accomplish the marketing and social networking tasks you need as a writer. If an author deploys a Facebook campaign correctly it can lead to new, regular readers and ultimately new fans.
Let's take a look at three things you, as an author, can do with Facebook:
Increase brand awareness with regular posts
With the nature of Facebook, most of the communicating is done on your wall, within your pictures, or in your status update.
Here is where you need to use your writing and communicating skills to create a series of campaigns designed to inform, entertain, and persuade your audience while constantly building your “brand.”
Your goal is to create short, targeted posts that solicit a response from your audience. You want to always be asking their opinion, encouraging them to comment, and cultivating conversations that lead to true interaction.
To do this effectively, create a schedule including at least one post a day. Also, try to mix in some comedy and tasteful attention grabbers. Use pictures, video clips, and jokes that relate to you, your products, and your industry to draw even more attention to your posts.
Also, don't be afraid to ask them to “like” your posts. It's actually the easiest way to get the exact response you want out of your readers.
Drive sales once established
Once you've grown your following to a comfortable level, you can go from a constant state of passively selling yourself to actual direct requests for action.
This doesn't mean you have to wait to request a call to action. It just means you will get a better response once you've established an ongoing relationship with your audience in which they’ve grown to trust you. It’s at this point where you can be straight forward with your sales requests.
Although, you should note that blatantly advertising with a generic sales pitch rarely works in this type of forum.
Build relationships while communicating with your readers
The end result of effectively employing memorable communication tactics while providing your readers with a quality product is that, you'll create lasting relationships.
These lifelong customers are one of the keys to your professional longevity. More important, these types of relationships spawn the coveted word-of-mouth marketing that drives real brand awareness building.
Plus, with so many users online communicating with each other through Facebook, there’s nowhere else on the web that offers such a statistical advantage for generating word-of-mouth referrals and sales.
So remember, it’s short sighted to use your Facebook account solely or the purpose of selling your product. Instead think of it as an extension of your mouthpiece and use it to sell yourself in a whole new digital way.