I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I love to consume it and hate to use it to sell books.
Social media is rarely effective at selling books in the manner that we think it will be. It’s often entangled with an element of ‘I’ve heard of this author who went viral and became a bestseller, so that’s also going to happen to me’.
The problem with social media is it’s now demanding that you give it all of your love and devotion and leave everything else behind. It’s also requiring you to get very comfortable with video content, especially vertical video, like TikTok and Reels, which can make a lot of authors feel stressed before they even come up with content to post.
I do think social media can be incredibly effective.
But I think in order to do this, you need to make it your hub. What is a hub?
Your hub is the one location you move all readers towards. Your desired end-game.
I use a hub and spoke method to direct my marketing. All marketing moves the reader towards my hub, like the spokes on a wheel. And my hub?
It’s my newsletter list.
But you might want to use Facebook Groups as your hub, or TikTok, or whatever.
That’s awesome…but you need to feed the algorithm to move books, like it or not. Otherwise, you’ll just be conducting a time-consuming experiment.
For example, here’s what Facebook says you should be doing to gain visibility there.
- posting video content
- posting multiple times per day
- posting stories and newsfeed and private messaging
- creating content that sparks engagement
But what if there was an easier way? What if you replaced that social media hub and the effort that’s not working, with emails?
Here’s what I know about email marketing.
- There’s no faster way to gain your reader’s trust than with our words inside an email.
- Emails get opened at an industry average of 22%. Compare that with the dismal 1-2% of social media and well…
- Marketing to your list is cheap and can yield you passive income over time. That’s income you do the work for once, and reap the rewards all year long.
Lately, I’ve been having a lot of these types of conversations about moving your hub to email and more and more authors and brands are leaving social media behind for other forms of marketing.
If you’re not sure about moving your focus to email, but know something just isn’t quite right, start by taking a look at your time and see what’s happening.
Are you spending a lot of time creating social content and is there an ROI on that time spent? Not to mention the fact that you get distracted easily inside the platform you’re supposed to be working on.
What if you changed your HUB to email? Would that be so bad? (Pro Tip: No. No, it wouldn’t be.)
You could batch your emails, say write 2 at a time and then you’d have a month’s worth of emails (if you’re sending bi-weekly) and so much more potential for the content to be seen. That is an ROI that feels worth it to me.
Again, I think social media should be a part of your marketing mix, but I think it’s better used as a SPOKE driving readers to join your HUB, your email list. Then you can nurture your readers deeper into your brand and sell them all the things you have to offer.