Social media design and analytical tools have made it a lot more convenient for authors to find information on both influencers and their target readers to inform their advertising campaigns. Any new author publishing for the first time can a long way in finding their readers and building their author platform with these tools. Our author support service uses them all the time due to the amount of functions they can carry out and how much time they save us. They can help understand your own and your competitor’s social media performance. They allow you to keep track of your competitors' actions, marketing initiatives, reader feedback, and much more. It's a rich source of information to grow your author marketing strategy. There is no one-size-fits-all analytics tool, however, and which one suits you will depend on your aims. Your best bet is to take some for a road test and go which ever feels the most user-friendly for you. Most of them have free trials that enable you to see what works for you.
BuzzSumo is a brilliant analytical tool that helps authors analyse the social engagement of their or any other author’s digital footprint. It covers a wide range of analytics from shares of your content on all social media platforms to understanding variables in top-performing content. BuzzSumo trending shows you what the world is sharing today in real-time. If a story is breaking, it will help you spot it before it goes viral. Topics expand your thinking by generating endless streams of ideas. Based on a single term, you can find synonyms, keywords and sample questions. You can then use BuzzSumo’s powerful analysis features to compare topics, track trends over time, identify top formats, and find the best times to publish content. You can dig into any domain to see where the most valuable links are coming from and use that information to improve your SEO. It has some free marketing tools that can cost you money in other places like: telling you the most effective social media posting times. There is a database of free images you can access as well as a very handy resizing tool. This site has one of the most user-friendly interfaces we have used. They offer a 30-day free trial which is very worth your while taking them up on.
Google Analytics offers basic analytical tools for both marketing and search engine optimization. Website performance is tracked, and visitor insights are collected using data collected using JavaScript code.The software can tell you the number of visitors to your pages. The source of visitors to your web pages and what they do while on your site. Even how long users spend on your site before leaving. It can also track social media traffic sources for your website and observe the conversions from social media posts as well. Furthermore, it helps authors to understand their readers’ behaviour from data reports, and improve advertising strategies accordingly. Additionally, it aids you in improving your SEO and content marketing. Anyone with a Google account can access the service for free as part of the Google Marketing Platform.
Sprout Social is an exceptional social media analytical tool. It is an easy choice on our list due to the requirement for cross-channel social media analytics. Sprout Social helps you in tracking variables including impressions on your Facebook page, clicks on your Twitter link, your engagement on LinkedIn, and your performance on Pinterest. The software helps you draw a comparison of your performance between your multiple networks at once. It also helps you create your own custom reports. Sprout Social has a powerful analytical system that puts everything from tags to trends at your fingertips.
How Sociable lets you measure both your competitors and your own accounts. It has premium and free versions. You can use the free version for a total of 12 different platforms, such as WordPress and Tumblr. But, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter are only included in the premium version of the tool. How Sociable has a different approach to social monitoring than other tools. It separates the scores of each platform. This scoring system helps you measure which platforms work best for you. It also helps you to understand which platforms need further improvement.
Promo Republic has awesome social media post design and scheduling services. It contains free images and easily adaptable templates and a calendar, so you know when to post what on all your social media accounts. You can do a month's worth of posts ahead of time and then get back on your writing. It’s functions as a kind of hybrid between Canva and Hootsuite. The inbuilt graphics editor gives you the option to choose the right dimension of what you want to create. All the social media platform dimensions are listed for you to make life very easy to resize and schedule images to your calendar. You can then quickly review the success of each of your posts, giving you the ability to repurpose them and use them again later down the line. In this way, you can soon build a large collection of marketing assets to have at your disposal. We saved so much time and money with this website. The Book Marketer's Self Publishing Service can't live without it!
Instachamp is an Instagram-based automation software that lets you build your audience on autopilot. It's Instagram-approved so it works very effectively. It gives you the ability to boost your engagement by automatically collecting reader contact details, replying to direct messages and story mentions. Again, this acts as a massive time saver for us. The more of your marketing tasks you can automate, the easier your life will become.
We talk about how you can use some of these tools in our book How to Reach Influencers. Influencer marketing can be an extremely lucrative way to sell books for indie authors. Especially If you find a targeted #booktoker or #bookstagrammer for your launch or promotion. Finding the right niche of people interested in your book can make all the difference. Since 2004, NPD Bookscan has been tracking U.S. book sales and estimates that in 2021 the American market sold 825 million books. It's the most prolific year yet. Bookscan attribute this, in part, to the collective influence of #booktokers, the TikTok book influencers passionately posting about their favourite books. At the time of writing this book, the hashtag #booktok had been tagged on 35.8 million videos. The #booktok hashtag has become so influential it is now monitored by both physical and online book retailers for what books that they should be merchandising!