Social Media Banners and Ads
Amanda Greenslade
Building an author platform and advertising your book through social media is imperative, however it doesn’t always result in stellar book sales. As with any other marketing campaign, you really need to have a solid professional book marketing plan—including sales text, graphics and optimised meta-data—to see a return on investment.
This article is only about one small part of social media marketing for authors, and that is the use of attractive graphics on social media as banners and ads.
Social media banners for authors
You need to keep your message simple in every banner. If you’re promoting your author platform you need your name or website URL, an image of yourself, your book covers and a call to action. If you mostly write for children and young adults it needs to appeal to parents and young people.
Each social media platform requires a slightly different approach to the banner ad because of the layout of the website. Below are the different banners used for my author platform:
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube
Google+
Some other banner images we have designed:
Sometimes it’s best just to include imagery of your book cover artwork and some sales lines about the book. In other cases you might like to include a head shot, your website address and/or your name.
Social media ad posts
When you make a post for social media, you probably already know that it’s far more likely to be read if there’s an image included. You can triple that for a short video. The best thing is if you can include a (good) video, but that’s a subject for another post. If an image is all you want, read on.
How to target the ad
You can post your ad to your own family, friends and followers, but this will only go so far. Even if you beg them to share it, salesy posts don’t tend to be shared much. Only something genuinely funny and interesting will be shared widely. If you’re essentially posting an ad for people to follow you or buy your book, then treat it like one.
Provide a link to buy or view more details about the item. Insert hash tags that might draw in random browsers. If you’re using a profile rather than a page, ensure your post is set to ‘public’ not ‘friends’ or else only your friends will be able to see the post. And finally, plan to spend at least $100 boosting your post to the target audience of your book. It probably won’t achieve anything without a boost.
What to put in the ad
If you are intending to boost your post (turning it into advertisement), make sure the image has less than 20% text content and at least 80% imagery. Social media platforms, like Facebook, understand their users—and they have deemed it more likely to succeed if your ad has less than 20% text.
Here are some examples of social media ads we have designed. Bear in mind that these go out with text and a hyperlink and hash tags, so they do not have to stand alone. They are simply illustrating the text that is sent as part of the post.
If you are seeking a professional graphic designer or book marketing expert to design your social media post images or manage social media for you, please contact PublishMyBook.Online.
Also be sure to consider our practical and strategic book marketing plans.