Independent authors are just that, INDEPENDENT! We don’t have a publisher, marketing team, agent or publicist working for us to sell our book. They have to rely on friends, family, and word of mouth. In this day and age, that means social media.

According to Statista, 70% of the U.S. population has at least one social media profile. By 2018, the number of worldwide social media users is expected to reach about 2.5 billion people. With so many consumers using social media every day, this presents a great opportunity for independent authors to reach their online audience.

Social media platforms offer a fun and creative platform to promote you book through videos, GIFs, and creative JPEGs for a broad audience. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, 95% of online adults ages 18 to 34 are likely to follow a brand on social media. However, when users engage with their social media profiles, it is because they find the content and information valuable. Whether they are looking for deals, enjoy entertaining content, or just want to learn more about a certain brand, social media users are open to engaging on social media channels.

That’s where independent authors can find their niche in marketing their novels. Your social media profiles provide yet another way to get more inbound traffic to your website. This makes marketing through social media an excellent strategy to complement your search engine optimization efforts. Each piece of content that you post to your social media profiles is another opportunity to bring new visitors to your site.

There are different platforms that can provide access for a variety of users. Facebook is one of the best social media platforms, with nearly two million monthly active users. Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with the most diverse audience. When it comes to age, users of all ages are logging onto Facebook, with the largest demographic being those ages 25-to-34. Owned by Facebook, Instagram is another popular channel that promises to be one of the best social media platforms for small business and entrepreneurs. Instagram has more than 700 million active users who log onto the app to enjoy photos and video posts from their friends, family, celebrities, and yes, even certain brands. In fact, according to BrandWatch, 50% of users follow brands on Instagram.

With an average of about 328 million active Twitter users worldwide, this channel is yet another one of the best social media platforms for your 2018 social media marketing strategy. As one of the top 10 websites in the United States, Twitter is the go-to place for the latest news and trends on a variety of topics. The audience on Twitter also tends to be a bit younger with 36% of users between the ages of 18 to 29. Then there’s YouTube. Founded in 2005 and acquired by Google in late 2006, YouTube has quickly become the second largest search engine in the world, right behind Google. What’s more is that YouTube users are watching a billion hours of video each day and generating just as many views. This makes YouTube an excellent channel for reaching and engaging target consumers by creating and publishing compelling video content.

I have one other recommendation for you. If you plan to cross multiple social media platforms with your posts, I would suggest checking out Hootsuite. With this online program, you can put one post on all your social media platforms simultaneously. It also allows you to plan out your posts days in advance. You can find more, in depth information on the best social media platforms for brand marketing at Lyfe Marketing Blog.

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Mark Piggott is the author of the Forever Avalon book series. Forever Avalon is available for purchase as a paperback/ebook at Amazon. The Dark Tides is available for purchase as a paperback/ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iUniverse publishing. The Outlander War, Book Three of the Forever Avalon series is coming soon from Austin Macauley Publishing.