How To Automate Social Media To Sell Ebooks

Last updated: January 23, 2024

Using social media to market and sell ebooks and digital downloads can be incredibly effective, if done right.

It’s obvious to everyone social media is used every day by billions of people around the world. We all post and maintain a social presence, perhaps not a regularly updated one, but your business needs more than a post every once in a while to benefit from the visibility and traffic that social media, when used well, can generate.

Social media marketing requires consistency, as well as up-to-date content in order to successfully drive traffic to your book’s website or ebook sales page.

Many social and content marketers would complain that social media management is the most time-consuming part of their job. There’s a remedy for that, though, and it could just boost your success rates in social media marketing.

Using an automation tool that covers the popular social media platforms allows you to add regular updates to your social media accounts and can help you keep your social accounts up to date, drive traffic to your site or ebook sales page, increase engagement with your posts, and leave you with extra time on your hands to tend to other important tasks, like working on your next ebook.

Most social media automation tools also allow you to post across all of your social media channels at once, which helps keep your voice consistent and saves you even more time.

Some of the main benefits of automation come from cleverly repeating your content, be it your most successful tweets or promotional posts for your ebooks, to advertise a sale or bundle for example.

Drive Traffic by Repeating Posts

Are you only sharing your posts once? Then you might be missing out on a lot of extra traffic that could help sell your ebook. Here’s a few reason why repeating your posts makes a lot of sense:

• You can expect more shares each time you post your content. Typically, if a post does well the first time it is posted, you will see success if posting it the second time around. You may only get a fraction of the likes or shares with each new posting, but even that is more than if you had only posted the content one time.
• You get new followers frequently so old content is still good content. This means that new people are following you all the time so that blog post from last month… it’s still new and exciting for them. This helps you continue to provide content to your subscribers, even when you aren’t exactly generating anything new. Typically, if it was a popular post, your older subscribers won’t mind seeing it again.
• Posts can be repeated at specific times in order to make them relevant in different time zones. This helps you reach more followers, including those that don’t browse the Internet on your typical schedule.
• You can repeat posts in a close time range to help you test out new headlines. This means you can use one headline to share the post then soon after (within an hour or so) share the same post, but with a different headline. This allows you to see how your followers react to different headlines, allowing you to choose the most popular option.

How to Successfully Repeat Posts

• Don’t post a carbon copy of your old content. Instead, rewrite the post to show a different side of the content. You can take the original posting and refer to a specific point in the content, using it to outline your new post’s title. This allows you to post the same content, thus driving more content to a specific page, without sounding like you’re mindlessly repeating yourself. Also, if the content didn’t catch someone’s eye the first time, restating it in different words may interest them the second time around.
• Space out your repeated posts. This sounds obvious, but you want to include different content in between repeats. One consistently repeated post without the distraction of new content makes your social media efforts look tired and old. The exception to this is when using repeats to perform headline research.
• Use images, GIFs, and videos to make repeated content interesting and unique the second time around. Even if you shared the original content with some type of image or GIF, you can change it and share the content with some new imagery the second time around. This will help you gain attention, even on reshared content.

The features you should look for

Automatic social media management tools have more than just time-saving benefits. Many of these tools offer tons of extras. Some things to look for include:

• Curated Content: This can save you hours of surfing the web for useful and relevant material to post. Some tools suggest popular content to you based on a set of keywords you outlined or import your favorite feeds. You can often also use these features to keep up with what your competition is posting as well as see new material posted that mentions your brand.
• Scheduling Suggestions: Some social media management tools will help you decide when the best time to post is by monitoring your social account’s activity levels during different parts of the day. You can also see time suggestions based on your follower’s different time zones, which helps you post content when it is most likely to be seen, thus increasing traffic and engagements.
• Bulk Scheduling and Smart Scheduling: You may find that some social media management tools allow you to schedule posts in bulk while others have a “smart scheduling” system that automatically schedules your posts for you based on the categories you sorted them to.
• Tracking Engagements: Some tools will also track your engagements across your different social media profiles. This means you can see how often people interact with particular posts, which helps you determine which type of content, as well as what posting times get the best results.
• Hashtag Suggestions: Using an automated social media management tools that offer hashtag suggestion features will help you tag relevant keywords in order to increase traffic and shares.
• Expiring Content: Some tools also have an “expiring content” feature which automatically removes certain content after a chosen date. This is great for limited promotions that are time sensitive.
• Apps and Extensions:To take convenience and time—saving one step further, you can use social media management tools that offer an app. This will allow you to easily and regularly check updates, search content, and see what’s happening across all of your accounts from the convenience of your smartphone. Other tools have an extension, such as a Google Chrome extension, which makes it easy to integrate your profiles across all of your devices or simply access all your profiles and your management tools more easily from your browser.

Best Social Media Automation Tools in 2021

The following are some of the best social media automation tools to help you sell ebooks:

MixBloom

MixBloom allows you to easily manage a queue of content for your social media accounts and share them at the rate you decide, much like Buffer. On top of this, MixBloom provides you with a complete social media writing service and content approval features. One of the main differences between MixBloom and other social media tools is that they match you with a Social Media Manager who learns about your brand and then curates and writes optimized social media posts specifically for you. The content is provided to you for review before it is automatically sent to your social media accounts. Having a dedicated social media assistant means you really only have to approve the content, saving you hours each week.

Buffer

Buffer was one of the first social media automation tools to come out and still thrives as one of the simplest solutions out there. Its main proposition is to simplify social media management by allowing you to group together all your social accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.), then maintain a queue of content for each, which you can fill with content using their browser extensions. Each of your accounts will have a separate queue and distinct posting schedules you can define based on your preferences. It’s a great starting point for you to get the benefits of social media automation, like automated posting, repeating posts, importing content from RSS feeds and more.

Zoho Social

Zoho Social has been around for a long time and is well-known as one of the top social media automation tools. It offers everything from a simple scheduler to a full-service way to manage your brand on social media. Its top features include unlimited post scheduling, content calendar management, team collaboration, smart monitoring and custom reports to analyze your social media performance. They offer a free trial and business plans start at €10 per month.

Meet Edgar

Edgar is one of the most popular social media automation tools out there. This social media posting tool has lot of useful features. Edgar reshares your content to ensure that you never run out of updates. In between reshares, it will pull content from your content library, where you can share and categorize as many relevant updates as you choose. The queue can be set to sort through these categories at different times, allowing you to control what type of content is posted around the clock. Edgar offers other convenient features, too, like an easy to use browser extension and the ability to set content to automatically expire at a given date. You can also use Edgar to create shortened URLs for your posts and import your favorite RSS feeds.

Post Planner

Post Planner is another popular option that offers similar features, such as the ability to recycle content automatically to keep your feed fresh and active. Post planner also includes a suggested content feature that helps you easily find content to your social media profiles. This makes it easy to drive traffic to your sites without spending too much time searching for interesting content. Post Planner uses given keywords to provide you with popular content that should be interesting for you. Post Planner will automatically schedule posts for you. All you need to do is save content in categories then create a plan selecting how you would like the categories shared. Post Planner uses their algorithms to share posts to your social media accounts at times when they are most likely to get the most attention, creating increased engagement for your content.

As an author, your schedule is probably pretty packed, leaving little time for marketing. Choosing a good social media automation tool or service can save you time and effort while simultaneously increasing your social media marketing success.

Want to learn more about boosting your sales and getting to grips with marketing? Check out our seller resources and get off to a flying start!