Social media for bookshops: a practical guide for 2026

People choose a bookshop for its taste and its people. Your social media should feel like browsing your shelves with a bookseller who has read everything.

TikTok's newsroom has described #BookTok as the go-to hashtag for all content about books, reading and writing, and says bookshops use it to post about working in a shop, share recommendations, announce restocks and new releases, and encourage people to visit. Instagram suits beautiful shelves, staff picks and stories from the shop floor. Facebook is strong for events and local groups. On a Google Business Profile you can publish events with a description, photo, video and button, which suits launches and signings. Google's free listings can show your products on Google, and in-store stock can appear in free local listings with opening times, directions and stock status if you opt in.

Sources: TikTok Newsroom: TikTok made me read it, #BookTok (November 2021), checked 15 October 2026; Google Business Profile Help: Create & manage posts on your Business Profile, checked 15 October 2026; Google Merchant Center Help: Free listings for products, checked 15 October 2026

Four or five posts a week, plus stories when deliveries arrive, keeps a bookshop in people's feeds. Make recommendations personal: who on the team loved it, why, and who it is for.

• Monday: staff pick of the week, with one line on who should read it.
• Tuesday: new releases on the table, with a short reason to read each.
• Wednesday: 'if you liked this, try this', a stack of three books.
• Thursday: an upcoming event, signing or book club meeting.
• Friday: a short video recommendation from a bookseller.
• Saturday: the shop in stories. Restocks, the window display, a quiet corner.
• Monthly: what your book club is reading and how to join.

A short quotation is often the best way to sell a book, but a passage from a novel is someone else's copyright. In the UK, fair dealing for criticism, review or quotation is allowed for any type of copyright work, with a sufficient acknowledgement; GOV.UK says the test is how a fair-minded and honest person would have dealt with the work, and that usually only part of a work may be used. In the US, the Copyright Office lists criticism and comment among uses that may qualify as fair use, and one of the four factors is how much of the work you use.

In practice, quote a line or two, name the author and title, and add your own comment on why it matters. Never photograph whole pages or chapters. For cover images and author photos, use the press materials publishers send for promotion where you can, and ask the publisher's publicity team if you are unsure.

Sources: GOV.UK: Exceptions to copyright, checked 15 October 2026; U.S. Copyright Office: Fair Use Index, checked 15 October 2026

Events are great content, but the people in the room did not all come to be on social media. Tell the audience if you are filming or livestreaming, and agree with the author what you will post.

Children's story time needs more care. NSPCC Learning advises written consent from the parent or carer and the child, not supplying children's names with images, removing location data and other metadata before uploading, and choosing images that focus on the activity, taken from a distance rather than close-ups. A crowd of small backs facing a storyteller is a better photo than a child's face anyway.

Parents will take their own photos. The ICO says that photos taken for purely personal use generally fall outside data protection law, but posting to a public account is likely to go beyond that. You can politely ask parents not to post other people's children.

1. Put a sign at the door when you are filming or photographing an event.
2. Agree with the author what you will share, including any recordings.
3. For children's events, get written consent and offer an easy no.
4. Photograph children from behind or at a distance, and never caption names.
5. Remove location data from image files before posting.

Sources: NSPCC Learning: Photography and sharing images, checked 15 October 2026; ICO (UK Information Commissioner's Office): Photos in schools, checked 15 October 2026

Book posts start conversations, which is good. Reply to recommendations with recommendations, answer questions about stock and ordering, and thank people who tag you in photos of their haul.

Expect the occasional 'it's cheaper online'. Reply calmly with what you offer: advice, ordering any title, events, a place in the community. Do not criticise other retailers. Some books draw strong opinions; set house rules, leave disagreement up and remove abuse. Ask people to hide spoilers.

Ask every customer for a Google review in the same way, for example on a bookmark at the till. Google's policy says merchants must not offer incentives for reviews, discourage negative reviews or ask only happy customers, and the US FTC's rule bans incentives conditioned on reviews expressing a particular sentiment.

Sources: Maps User Generated Content Policy: Prohibited & restricted content, checked 15 October 2026; FTC final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (August 2024), checked 15 October 2026

Plan around publication dates, events and the reading calendar: summer reading, back to school, the Christmas gift season and World Book and Copyright Day in April.

Disclosure: this guide is published by Zolyp, an AI social media manager. Zolyp plans a calendar around your content pillars, writes and designs each post, and schedules it to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Business, X, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Threads. You start in review-everything mode, so nothing goes live without your approval. Brand Brain holds your shop's tone and the words you never use, so captions sound like your booksellers. Plans start at $29/mo. Everything in this guide works just as well done by hand.

• Week 1: list the month's big releases, events and author visits.
• Week 2: film three or four bookseller recommendations in one session.
• Week 3: post events on your Google profile and in local Facebook groups.
• Week 4: see which posts brought people into the shop or to events, and repeat those.