Social media success depends on time and effort

This is the first post about my experience reading David Meerman Scott‘s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR. As I said in November, I am going to post a few different posts about what I learned from reading it and how what I learned could be translated to marketing as an author.

One of the things that strikes me is that if you don’t put time and effort into your social media efforts, they probably won’t succeed.

In Scott’s forward to the book, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, he says that, as well. Inbound marketing (social media and web marketing, basically), is something that you can do, he writes, but “it does require an investment of your time and creativity.” The authors of Inbound Marketing – Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah – write, “…social media is about people connecting, interacting and sharing online.” You have to interact, which means you have to invest time into your web site to create those interactions. All of these authors say that it’s not a three or four week sprint. It’s even more than a marathon. It’s a long-lasting investment that, if you do it right and stick with it, will yield results.

Scott also writes in his book that it’s way more important to find your niche than to try and make your product fit every consumer’s needs. So, in essence, I shouldn’t be marketing my book to every reader out there. There are some readers who don’t care for fantasy novels, so no matter how hard I try to market it to them, unless they’re a family member or close friend, they probably won’t read it. I should focus on bloggers who enjoy fantasy novels, and readers who read science fiction and fantasy. I can define my average reader more than that, though. Focus on the age group that I meant my book for: young adults. Even more than that, I think that, since my book is told through the eyes of a young woman, I should focus on young female adults who enjoy fantasy novels. So that is my niche.

That’s just the first stepping stone, though. Scott writes, “Publishers consider all of the following questions: Who are my readers? How do I reach them? What are their motivations? … How can I entertain them and inform them at the same time? What content will compel them to purchase what I have to offer?” These are all questions that authors marketing their books should ask themselves, as well.

So consider all of these questions as you decide the hows, whens, whats, whys, etc., for marketing your book.

I’ll have more insights as I get further into Scott’s book.

About Brittany Westerberg

I'm a lover of writing and books. I graduated from South Dakota State with a master's degree in communications in 2011, the same year I was first published. I'm a wife and mom, and I work in content and digital marketing in South Dakota.