Four ways to use snippets in marketing your book

Bill Garrison, a Castle Gate Press author, is an expert at being a good father. To play that up, I created this poster.

Writers, I am sure you have noticed that the social media interaction on the Internet is getting briefer and briefer. In fact, to get attention on Facebook, the best thing often seems to be putting a short line or two on an image.

In our social media marketing, we need to go with the flow.

We can take a longer paragraph and splinter it, posting multiple times and in multiple places. Not only does this cater to short attention spans, but it’s good for our website. We can litter the Internet with links back to our website, which provide Google juice to bring our website up in the Google rankings, making it more findable.

Here are some suggestions.

1. Using your favorite photo editing software, find an image on the Internet that’s available for your use, and add a quote from your book (or a relevant quote to the story you are telling). (Don’t know how to make a poster? I’ll tell you at the end of this article.) Put it on Facebook and Pinterest, and anywhere else you are marketing–Twitter, Instagram, whatever.  Be sure to link it to your website, and be sure your website URL is actually on the photo somewhere.

2. For Pinterest, post it on your website and pin it from there, so it links back to your website. And when you pin it, be sure to put relevant keywords in the caption, keywords that someone might search on if they were looking for a book like yours.

3. Make a series of these posters that tie together. Post them one a day on multiple social media sites.

4. Put the series together into a Slideshare.net presentation, and be sure there’s a link on the last slide back to your website.

HOW??

Are you wondering how? Here’s a very useful suggestion. Formulate your question in your mind and then type it into Google.

You can find the answer to just about any how-to question this way.  So you might type in:  how do I make a poster for Pinterest?   or how do I make a slideshare slide show?

Then you can pick and choose among the options. You can type the same question into Youtube if you want to see only how-to videos on your subject.

I did this for making my very first Pinterest poster yesterday. Here’s one useful site I found: http://socialmediatoday.com/gsosk/805681/5-tools-create-images-pinterest

One thing to keep in mind: you can’t use just any old photo you find on the Internet, legally and morally. There are plenty of photographers who don’t share rights to their photos although they may put them up where they can be found, on Flickr for example.

On Flickr, make yourself an account if you don’t already have one, and then search using keywords for the photos you like. There are some buttons on the left side middle that let you specify what kind of rights you are looking for.

This photo I found yesterday for my very first poster had a creative commons license that specified that the photographer needed to be credited. So I created some small type of the URL for the photographer’s Flickr page, and put it at the bottom of the photo.