Social media has changed a lot over the years, constantly adding bots and AI to the mix of human interaction. Yet, a lot of experts claim that the 80/20 Rule for social media is still a prominent method of marketing your books. While I am skeptical, I’m willing to try anything to boost sales.
The trick is to make sure you’re targeting the right people and building a solid following. Otherwise, you could be screaming into the void, as so many of us do on a daily basis.
Still, a lot of humans swear by the format and continue to work on their social accounts every day.
What Is the 80/20 Rule for Social Media?
In a nutshell, the 80/20 rule refers to 80% of your posts focusing on free value while the other 20% focuses on a sale. So, if you post five times, at least one of those would be the link to your book or promoting yourself with the idea of selling something.
For example, let’s say we’re making five posts on Threads. They would look similar to:
- A fun fact about your characters
- Artwork related to your books or characters
- Something behind-the-scenes of being an author
- Sharing a writing tip
- Promoting your book, blog, or YouTube channel
The idea is to share things that are less salesy to deliver more of a human presence. It’s all about building trust, a strong following, and avoiding appearing like social media spam.
Posting too many “sales” posts could get annoying, which may lead to people unfollowing your account. When you think about it, success with the 80/20 rule is more about engagement than sales. People love being interactive with their favorite authors, which is the entire purpose of social media, right?
The more people who follow your account, the more likely you’ll make a sale during that 20% of your posts.
Non-Salesy Posts
OK, as an author, what kind of posts should you make that aren’t salesy? The short answer is that it really depends on your target audience and how they connect with you on a personal level.
Audiences vary wildly depending on the creator. Some people might appreciate candid behind-the-scenes photos while others might gravitate more to writing tips or cat memes. You’ll have to experiment with what posts get the most views, interactions, and comments.
That’s not the easiest thing to do, depending on the platform. Social media sites are notoriously vague when it comes to analytical information. Nonetheless, they often have just enough tools to get an idea regarding what works best with your audience.
So, what are some ideas to try to build a following? You could post:
- Your personal writing tips
- Comments about how you create characters
- Character art or sketches for upcoming books
- Sharing facts regarding the industry or book research
- Funny thoughts regarding the industry
- Relevant and humorous memes
- Industry news and your honest opinions
- Events that pique your interest
- Anything behind-the-scenes or updates
- Recommendations of your favorite books by others
- Surveys regarding anything related to the industry or genre
- Motivational posts that speak to others and inspire action
These are just some I thought of and used in the past. It’s hard to say which idea works better, as they all had roughly the same engagement. But I found that anything with an image or video often has the highest degree of engagement.
Why Am I Skeptical About Social Media Marketing In General?
Now, there are some folks out there who attest to how well the 80/20 Rule works for selling books. However, most of the information out there is sheer anecdotal. This means it relies on the “trust me bro” mentality.
Unfortunately, there is another 80/20 Rule called the Pareto Principle. This states that 20% of your efforts drive 80% of your sales. It’s not the same thing, which makes finding a case study for the specific example for social media extremely difficult to ascertain.
If you know of a study that goes beyond simple trust in the creator, I’d love to see it. Feel free to leave a comment.
Bots and AI Don’t Buy Books
Social media is full of bots and AI-driven accounts. In fact, videos of bot farms show just how prevalent fake accounts are online. And according to Statista, bots made up roughly 51% of all the traffic on the Internet in 2024.
The reason I bring this up is that bots and AI don’t buy books. It’s getting to the point where you don’t really know who is real nowadays. Well, outside of interacting with those accounts. Then, some of them become obviously apparent.
The bottom line is that you can’t market to a computer program.
Social Media Buries the Links
When making posts on most social media sites, any that contain links are often buried. This is because those social sites want people to stay on the platform for as long as possible. That’s why a cat meme will go viral when a link to your book maybe gets two or three likes.
That is somewhat funny to me, considering the selling point of social media back in the day was to market yourself or your business. Social media CEOs found it more profitable to keep you on the site for as long as possible, though. That means cutting out links off the platform.
The only one that I’ve found that still works for marketing off-platform is Pinterest. All of the others throttle visibility if there is a link to my book, blog, or YouTube channel.
Timing and Volume
Your audience uses social media at all times of the day. That means you need to consistently post all day long to get maximum exposure. Something you post at 8 am might not get seen by a fan at 5 pm. This means making content all day long. That is, unless you use a sharing app, like Buffer or (God forbid) Paddypost.
That’s perhaps one of the biggest complaints among self-published authors and social media. It’s a hard grind of constant content for maybe a handful of sales throughout the month.
Then, you have to consider the sheer volume of content you need to make. You would need to publish between 3 and 5 posts per day on most social platforms, and that can add up quickly if you’re trying to connect with people on various social sites.
There is a reason why a lot of medium and large businesses hire someone for social media. That’s all they do all day long.
Of course, you can avoid content being buried by paying for ads. But not everyone has the bankroll for that. On the flip side of that coin, however, I know authors who make most of their sales from something like Facebook ads. So, it might be worth considering.
When all is said and done, it’s going to take a lot of posts throughout the day, every day, to reach your target audience.
Poor Return On Time Investment
When you consider the sheer amount of time you spend to make a single sale using free posts on social media, the ROI is staggeringly low. Of course, this is mostly anecdotal, as I haven’t seen a study showing the actual numbers yet.
However, most authors I’ve spoken to directly over the years attest to spending a lot of time making content on social media just to sell a book or two per week, if that. I know one author whose goal is to simply make $100 this month in sales from mostly social media posts.
In this instance, the idea of the 80/20 rule doesn’t make much sense, especially if you don’t have a lot of time on your hands.
Do I Smell a Case Study Coming?
As a creator, there are simply too many variables at play to guarantee what will absolutely work for social media. The content you create, the audience you’re trying to reach, and the genre in general are just a few of them that can have a profound difference from one another.
That’s one of the reasons why I like conducting case studies on my own websites. It not only gives me data to share with those who have similar blogs, but it also gives me actionable data about what works best in my situation.
The 80/20 Rule should be easy enough to turn into a case study, provided I have enough time to schedule content. Unfortunately, every social media site has varying ways to display analytical data. Not all of them want to share the same information, which makes tracking successful posts quite difficult to directly compare.
Still, it would be interesting to see if the 80/20 Rule works as well as some of these “experts” claim. It’s all about building a peer-reviewed study and duplicating the results.
Maybe I’ll have to experiment with a case study once I am in a more stable position. Things are kind of up in the air at the moment, and I need to stabilize some things before adding more to my plate.
IYKYK
How Do You Market Your Books?
The biggest reason why self-published authors don’t sell a lot of books is the lack of efficient marketing. No one is going to buy the book if they don’t know it exists. Now, the 80/20 Rule might help you build an audience and increase the chances of you making a sale, but is it worth your time overall?
I don’t know, to be honest. I’ve seen some people claim to make a six-figure income from marketing books on social media. But I’ve also seen others constantly complain that they can’t seem to make a single sale.
Regardless of how you feel about social media, you need to find a way to get yourself and your book in front of your target audience. Sitting around and hoping isn’t going to generate thousands of dollars per month.
Truth be told, I’ve made more sales at in-person events than I’ve ever made online.
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