Don’t get me wrong, I love social media. I love me some Twitter, and Facebook, and Flikr, and YouTube, etc. I love them so much I have to be careful not to lose my job, like my friend with the vampire chat room back in the 90’s. Does a strong social media platform work for marketing? Sorta. But not really. Social media is for being social, and social interaction DOES lead to name recognition, and goodwill. Those thing, in the end, correlate to product sales and customer loyalty. It’s a long haul though. It requires active work on your part to build relationships and the payoffs are small if all you measure the value of the relationships in is product sales. There’s a more lucrative payout in standing on a street corner and hawking your product to passerby. Do I still believe in social media? Absolutely. I’m in it for the long haul, and social media is just one cog in a giant wheel of a long term marketing plan. But if you are a hard core finance type, if you need to immediately translate effort into product sales, the effort put in to social media does not pay off.
Here’s someone who said it better than me: The Twitter, it is NOT for selling books from the blog The Red Pen of Doom . I loved this blog post so much I read it twice. I printed it and put it under my pillow.
If, like me, you’re going to commit to the long haul and spend a lot of time on Twitter, stop thinking of it as “selling
debradunbar
There are some days when my ratio isn’t great either, but I try to make up for it other times.
Glad you enjoyed the post! Thanks for stopping by and for commenting!
Miranda Stork
Great post! I admit mine sometimes goes dangerously close to the ratio of 60/40, but I definitely try to more of a personality than a spewing sales machine. I find people get more interested in your and your books if you actually take the time to talk to them. I lose track sometimes, but I always try to reply to people who send me a message, and I also look out for funny things I can comment along with. I think Facebook is useless for that, which is why I don’t use it much, but on Twitter it’s like a giant conversation, which is what makes it brilliant for….Socialising. 😀
debradunbar
Me too!
Top of my Twitter/Facebook “buy” list are people who take the time to interact with me, followed by a random selection of followers.
I think writers are told they must have a social media platform, and tend to use the “spam” marketing model as their template. Such a giant fail.
Rainy Kaye
Very well said! I couldn’t agree more. Social media is for, um, socializing. Building relationships. Those, in turn, should help with selling your book–but that’s not the actual point. Anytime I have actually read a book thanks to Twitter was because the author actually interacted with me as a human, not a spam machine 🙂