Although I am not a writer, I have talked to a lot of writers/authors and publishers about tips for using social media to promote and sell your book. Here are the ten best tips that I have heard.

1. Use a program like Hootsuite to organize your Facebook posts (and Tweets) so that you can not only make sure that you are consistent about posting, but so that you can do the work all at once and ‘set it and forget it’ if you need to. This will allow your daily interaction to be responding to your fans and engaging them, rather than posting.
2. Build a fan page on Facebook where you can strategically build a relationship with your fans.
3. Use Twitter to push people to your Facebook page or a specific promotion for your book.
4. Use your book cover(s) as part of your profile pictures at the top of your Facebook fan page.
5. If you want to engage your fans, ask questions to get them talking and interacting. Ask their opinion about topics, plots, characters, etc.
6. Give away free content. If you are a non fiction writer, and you have key information for your audience that may or may not be in your book, give some of it away. This can be a daily tip, devotion, thought-of-the-day, etc. If you are a fiction writer, share ‘insider’ information about your characters in your posts. Give readers something extra that they might not get from your books alone. I have even heard of authors posting as their book’s characters and building a relationship with readers that way.
7. Use Facebook advertising to increase the LIKES on your Facebook fan page. This is an easy way to find the niche market that you have written for, or fans of other authors similar to you. Facebook has some great tools to allow you to narrow your target advertising and build your followers fast and relatively inexpensively.
8. Share a link for your fans to buy your book on your Facebook page. You may have your own website with a store, or you may want to send your customers to another on-line retailer.
9. If you work with Snowfall Press, you can utilize the Snowfall Facebook App that will automatically install a bookstore on your Facebook fan page, and allow you to sell your book through a PayPal check out system, where the book order will be printed-on-demand and drop shipped directly to your customer. This minimizes your risk, and is one of the only directly sales options available for books on Facebook.
10. Experiment! New ideas and tools are being created all the time. The most important thing is to do it. It is easy to plan or procrastinate. Quoting our iconic modern philosopher NIKE, ‘Just Do It.’

If you are an author, what other tips would you suggest? Or, what Facebook marketing ideas have you seen work really well, even with other products?