Social media is an important tool to engage with your audience and promote your book. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick are leaders in social media marketing. Their book THE ART OF SOCIAL MEDIA, published by Portfolio, shares great strategies and tips for creating a successful social media platform. 

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Be Bold

Success favors the bold as well as the interesting on social media, so don’t hesitate to express your feelings and agenda.

Be Brief

Brevity beats verbosity on social media. You’re competing with millions of posts every day. People make snap judgments and move right along if you don’t capture their interest quickly.

Be Visual

Every post—literally every single post—should contain “eye candy” in the form of a picture, graphic, or video. According to a study by Skyword, “On average, total views [of its clients’ content] increased by 94% if a published article contained a relevant photograph or infographic when compared to articles without an image in the same category.”

Be Organized

If your post on Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn is longer than four paragraphs, try to use a bulleted or numbered list. This makes it easier to read because the information is organized into smaller chunks, and it reduces the “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) effect.

Be Sly

I find posts that are titled “How to…,”  “Top Ten…,” or “The Ultimate…” irresistible. These words say to me, This is going to be practical and useful. 

Be Distributed

Using tools to schedule and distribute posts isn’t cheating. It’s what smart people do to optimize their sharing. Anyone who insists that you must manually share your posts is silly. Most followers can’t tell how a post was shared, and if you have a life outside social media, you probably can’t manually share posts throughout the day. There are multiple scheduling tools including Hootsuite, Friends+Me and Buffer.

Be a Mensch

“Give to others without having an agenda,” says  Mari Smith, the queen of Facebook. If you share purely for the joy of helping others, the amount of goodness and reciprocity you’ll receive will surprise you.

Be Found

Hashtags are a beautiful thing. They connect posts from people all over the world and add structure to an otherwise unstructured ecosystem. When you add a hashtag to a post, you are telling people the post is relevant to a shared topic.

Be Active

By “active” we mean three to twenty different (that is, not repeated) posts per day. That’s a guideline. As long as your posts are good, you can share more than that. But if you share one or two crappy posts per day, that’s too much.

Be Promotional

We hardly ever do this, as a matter of pride and principle, but paying to promote posts on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter can work. This ensures that more people will see your posts.

You can also “pin” your posts to the top of your page on Facebook and Twitter. This means that the post remains as the first visible story at the top of your Timeline. This isn’t as effective as paying for promotion, but it’s free.

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About Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online design service, and an executive fellow of the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple and special advisor to the CEO of the Motorola business unit of Google. His many acclaimed books include THE ART OF THE START and ENCHANTMENT. Visit www.twitter.com/GuyKawasaki

About Peg Fitzpatrick

Peg Fitzpatrick is a social media strategist innovating the world of social media. She’s spearheaded successful social-media campaigns for Motorola, Google, Audi, Canva, and Virgin. When she dies and meets Saint Peter, the first thing he’ll say is, “I follow you on Pinterest.” Visit www.pinterest.com/PegFitzpatrick

via 10 Tips for Writers on Creating Perfect Social Media Posts from Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick - Book Country Blog