Before I get to the five key things you need to know about social media, a brief history lesson might be in order. Whether you know it or not, social media marketing all started with a chicken—well, actually a guy in a chicken suit. In 2004, Burger King launched a campaign on the internet called Subservient Chicken to promote the idea that at Burger King, you could have it your way. (Why a chicken? The campaign coincided with the launch of their new chicken sandwiches.) The idea was that you could type in any command and the chicken would do whatever you asked—for example, you could tell it to do karate or flap its wings. One day after its release, the campaign got a million hits; a week after its release, it got 20 million hits.
The key to the success of this campaign was that it was engaging enough that consumers shared it with their friends. So why is this important? The Burger King example illustrates how powerful social media can be, whether you’re promoting burgers or, as in our case, books. At its core, social media are about building relationships. The only difference between social media and a cocktail party is that with social media, you’re not face-to-face with the people you’re interacting with. You’re using tools like Facebook, Twitter, or WordPress to interact instead. These highly accessible and scalable tools harness the power of social interaction to disseminate information.
Social media can be broken down into ten broad categories:
• publishing platforms, • sharing platforms, • discussion platforms, • social networks, • microblogs, • live streams, • live casts, • virtual worlds, • social games, and • MMOs (massively multiplayer online games).
So clearly there’s a lot to learn. But what are the five key things that you need to know to be successful marketing your book? First we’re going to focus on mastering a few specific tools. Then we’ll talk about building relationships, using tags (which is related to your blog), being regular, and being yourself.
Master a Few Social Media Tools
My suggestion is that you master just a few kinds of social media, but which ones should you focus on? Of the ten categories mentioned above, I suggest focusing on just four when it comes to marketing your book:
• a publishing tool,• a video sharing site, • a social network, and• a microblog.
Why these four? Well, the goal is to get the most bang for your buck. Some social media can be very effective marketing tools, but only if you’re willing to devote a lot of time and energy to them. Blogging, for example, is extremely effective but an awful lot of work, whereas using a social network like Facebook allows you to reach a large number of people with less time investment. Focusing on these four tools is a good way to maintain a balance of time and resources as an author.
For your publishing tool (your blog), I suggest WordPress for easy access, and they offer some simple steps to get you started at WordPress.com. There are other platforms you can use, but I recommend WordPress, and it works very well for authors.
You should also have a video sharing platform, because people like to get information in various ways. Some people like to read, which they can do on your blog. Others like video. In May of 2010, comScore, a leading internet research company, reported YouTube hit all-time highs with 14.6 billion videos viewed and more than 100 videos viewed per user. Needless to say, YouTube remains the dominant player in video rankings; 43 percent of videos viewed on the internet are viewed on that site. YouTube is pretty straightforward to use, too, so it’s your best option for a video sharing site.
For your primary social network, I recommend Facebook. It’s the fastest-growing and arguably most well-known social networking tool in the marketplace today.
Finally, there’s your microblog. Some people like to read, some like to watch videos, and still others like to get a simple, quick message. That’s what microblogging is for. What Facebook is to social networking, Twitter is to microblogging. It’s easy to use and well known.
So the first of the five key things you need to do to market your book successfully is master a few tools. The four I suggested above are a great place to get started, especially if you’re new to social media, but they’re by no means your only options. The important thing is to pick three or four tools and learn to use them very well.
Build Relationships
Now that we’ve talked about the tools that you can use, I want to move on to the second key to using social media: building relationships. You might be thinking, “Wait a minute. I’m trying to sell books here, not build relationships.” You may have heard the old sales mantra, “People love to buy; they hate to be sold.” Social media is about building relationships and trust. It’s about engaging prospective readers so that they become readers and ultimately tell their friends about your book. Think about the impact a friend can have on what you buy. The 2009 Book Consumer Annual Review prepared by Bowkers and Publisher’s Weekly noted that one of the top eight factors that influence a customer’s decision to purchase is the recommendation of a friend. Social media allows you to begin building the foundation for a trusting relationship. In her book The Zen of Social Media Marketing, author Shama Hyder Kabani provides three easy and memorable steps for engaging and relationship building: attract, convert, and transform.
Attracting means getting the attention of those who are already talking about you. They can be found in the blogosphere, through Twitter, or on Facebook. In addition, you want to consider reaching out to traditional media that are also leveraging social media. It’s hard to watch CNN or Fox News or any of the mainstream news outlets without hearing one of the reporters talk about following them on Twitter or Facebook. The second step, converting, is using your blog or website to turn these strangers into prospects or customers. The final step is transforming successes (people who have already purchased your book) into testimonials and case studies. So when you successfully engage a reader, you can use that experience by telling others about it and allowing people to celebrate your book. That transforms the relationship.
Here’s an example of this process. We recently provided social media services for author Joe Cammarata, whose book Face of Courage chronicles his experience at Ground Zero and the loss of his brother who was a firefighter during the attacks. To attract attention, we advised Joe to reach out on relevant topics, such as the mosque near Ground Zero and the recent debate on health care for first responders. While his book didn’t directly address these issues, he had relevant experience and credibility that put a human face on those stories. In five weeks, we were able to increase his blog traffic from thirteen views a week to over 2,800 views a week. Joe attracted people by figuring out how his book related to topics they were already talking about. He converted them into readers when they read his blog and started to learn about his story. And now he can transform that success into more publicity for his book. That’s how you build relationships using social media.
Use Tags
We’ve talked about mastering a few tools, building relationships. Now I’m going to turn to your blog, and I’m going to talk about tags. On most blogs, you’ll see tags at the bottom of each post—a list of hyperlinked words that give a quick idea of the post’s content. So what are tags? Tags are key to driving traffic to your blog. They are sets of instructions or identifiers for search engine spiders to read that describe the content that is included on your web page. They essentially increase the likelihood that you will rise in search engine results.
So what are my tips for tags? How should you set up your tags, and how should you use them to help increase the findability of your book? Well, you need to choose tags specific to your post. The more specifically they relate to what you’re writing about, the more likely it is that search engines will return your site as a result for those terms. You also want to look at other people who are blogging about you and see what tags they’re using. Try to identify the most popular tags, and then choose a few that apply to what you’re blogging about. The third thing that you really need to do with tags is update them regularly. Clean them out and update them to ensure that they’re still relevant to what you’re writing about on your blog. The more relevant those tags are to what you’re writing about, the better. So tags are all about making it easier for prospective readers to find information about your book through search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo as well as other social sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
Be Regular
The fourth key to using social media to successfully market your book is to be regular. You can’t just post every once in a while and expect readers to keep coming back; you have to give yourself a schedule and stick to it. In other words, you have to plan your work and work your plan. We have our authors use a blogging editorial calendar. The calendar notes a blog topic, indicates the week it’s going to run, and gives a deadline that they need to meet so that we can get the blog posted for them. It also identifies any multimedia, such as the cover of the book or a video, that we could use with the blog post. We also provide links for the authors to link to in their articles. This calendar is just a tool we use in order to be regular. Not only do you want to blog on topics related to your book, but you also want to reach out to people who are already talking about them. This, too, requires discipline. Each week, as you’re thinking about your blog topic, you should look for sites or blogs where there is already dialogue going on about that topic. So again it’s all about building discipline into your approach. The key message here is that you can’t do social media once in a while and expect success. You’ve got to take a disciplined approach to get results. I strongly suggest you use an editorial calendar like the one I just described.
Be Yourself
The fifth and final key to using social media is simple: be yourself. I often hear authors saying, “I don’t know what to blog about. I don’t know what I should tweet about. Twitter seems so irrelevant to what I’m doing. I don’t really have anything that I can tweet. It’s only forty characters. I don’t know what to say in that space.” Well, what you need to do is just be yourself, have fun, and let people know that you’re a real person. We suggest three key things when you’re out blogging or tweeting: write about yourself as an author, write about topics in your book, and find audiences who are already tweeting about things similar to what you’re talking about and reach out to them. Social media are tools; they don’t change who you are. Be yourself, let people see who you are, and figure out how you fit into the existing conversation.
Master a few key tools. Build relationships. Use tags. Be regular. Be yourself. Keep these five key concepts in mind, and you’ll be well on your way to using the power of social media to market your book.