Social media outreach should be part of your author and book marketing campaign. How you manage your social media is entirely up to you and your short and long-term goals. I’m a big fan of scheduling social media posts but if you don’t have a website and lots of content on that website that you can post, there’s no reason to autoschedule anything.
Social Media Where You Can Autoschedule
This is by no means a complete list of places that allow you to autoschedule posts, but these are the main social media sites that are allowed by most schedulers.
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Facebook – Really easy to autoscedule to Author Pages, which it damned well should be given they have the worst engagement rate in the industry due to their overly strict algorithm (They want you to boost posts to even reach the people who are following your page. Not shitting you.) You cannot autoschedule to your personal feed.
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Twitter – Insanely easy as long as you don’t go over the 280 character limit.
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LinkedIn – Character limited like Twitter, but extremely easy.
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Instagram – Fucking nightmare. The image dimensions are so strict on Instagram that it really takes forever to schedule content. If Instragram wasn’t known for its insanely high interaction rate, I’d tell you to skip it, but Instagram has the highest engagement rate of all the major social media outlets.
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Pinterest – Not as difficult as Instagram, but the image requirement is still a bitch and a half.
Reasons to Autoschedule Social Media
Active accounts get more engagement and more followers than accounts that post very little, and the more people that see your books and your content, the more likely they are to click on it. I was checking my Twitter Reach the other day. Keep in mind I currently have 10,000 followers not a million. Every 12 hours, I reach 46,745 accounts, and I get 893,850 image impressions. That’s sheer volume of tweets and good hashtagging. If you check your numbers, and they’re better than mine, congratulations, you are truly busting your ass and should be very proud of yourself. If they’re not as good or you wish they were better, consider going out and following more people and autoscheduling your tweets to run every 60 minutes around the clock. You will see improvements, and you do not need to spend a dime on it. You’ll just need to spend a little time on it.
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You want your accounts to be consistently active around the clock.
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You have lots of evergreen (always relevant content) that you can post along with your book posts.
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You want more time to interact with your followers.
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You want more time to find new followers that might enjoy your books and content.
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You’re never on your social media account (Automation is set and forget. I do mine once a month)
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You go through periods of “I can’t be here right now”. (Your automation will cover the times you can’t, for whatever reason, be on your social media accounts.)
Reasons to Not Autoschedule Social Media
While there are lots of reasons to automate your social media posts, there are some very valid reasons why you don’t want to do it. Scheduled posts do not get the same kind of engagement as posts you sent using the TWEET function in your phone application and browser. On average I get ½ to 1/3rd the image impressions and engagement on a scheduled tweet as I do my non-hashtagged, non-linked random comments. As an example, I posted a random comment and in 31 minutes, it had 308 image impressions and 7 engagements. The autoscheduled post behind it at 33 minutes had 113 image impressions and 0 engagements. The takeaway: Your autoscheduled posts are going to do worse than tweets you posted manually. Other reasons you wouldn’t want to autoschedule include:
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You have nothing to post. You don’t have a website or a blog with evergreen content.
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All you have are links to your books.
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You’re online all day posting random comments and such already.
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You hate social media, and you have no interest in doing anything with it.
Making the Decision to Automate or Not
When making the decision to automate your social media accounts with scheduled posts, consider how often you are on your accounts during the day, your work schedule and your family schedule. If you find yourself too busy to regularly manage your social media accounts manually, spending a few hours one day a month scheduling your social media posts may benefit you. If you find that you’re always on your accounts anyway, you may not need to automate.
