How Can Publishers Successfully Use Social Media to Sell Books?
Social media marketing adviser Jesse S. McDougall discusses strategies that engage consumers and increase revenue
October 2009 By Heather Fletcher
As an author of Internet-marketing books and the former Web editor for Chelsea Green Publishing, Jesse S. McDougall knows a bit about using the Internet—and specifically, social media marketing—to sell books.
McDougall now runs White River Junction, Vt.-based Catalyst Webworks—a Web production and marketing firm—and much of what the “Start Your Own Blogging Business” author teaches clients is what he helped to pioneer at Chelsea Green.
On Thursday, Oct. 29, McDougall will serve as a panelist on the on-demand webinar, “Social Media Strategies That Sell Books,” part of the Publishing Business Virtual Conference & Expo: Digital Content Day @ Your Desk . Here, he gives Book Business Extra a sneak preview of what virtual conference attendees will learn:
Book Business Extra: Many marketers criticize social media as not having proven, measurable sales results. How can publishers track whether their social media efforts are working?
Jesse S. McDougall: ... When I was with Chelsea Green, what we kept an eye on was the Amazon sales rank for the day. So if we had a promotional effort for one of our books on, let's say, Facebook and Twitter, … we would make a note of the sales rank in the morning and then the sales rank after [the] promotion. Obviously, that's not a perfect indicator, because ... people buy books from a wider range of [retailers].
... We also watched our own Web site's traffic. ... If it was a direct link from Facebook or Twitter or YouTube right back to us, and they purchased the book, we could track that. ... When we would send a link out in any of these promotions, ... the strategy that we had was [that] all this content we promote has a link back to a specific page on our site. And so as this content traveled out through these social media networks, we could track that link and where people were finding it. ... We watched all online channels. ... From the time that [Chelsea Green] launched [its] new social media platform strategy to, I think, something like six to eight months later, we'd seen our Web traffic double. And a year later, we'd seen online sales go up by 30 percent. ... We ... attributed the boost in sales largely to this new social media strategy.
McDougall now runs White River Junction, Vt.-based Catalyst Webworks—a Web production and marketing firm—and much of what the “Start Your Own Blogging Business” author teaches clients is what he helped to pioneer at Chelsea Green.
On Thursday, Oct. 29, McDougall will serve as a panelist on the on-demand webinar, “Social Media Strategies That Sell Books,” part of the Publishing Business Virtual Conference & Expo: Digital Content Day @ Your Desk . Here, he gives Book Business Extra a sneak preview of what virtual conference attendees will learn:
Book Business Extra: Many marketers criticize social media as not having proven, measurable sales results. How can publishers track whether their social media efforts are working?
Jesse S. McDougall: ... When I was with Chelsea Green, what we kept an eye on was the Amazon sales rank for the day. So if we had a promotional effort for one of our books on, let's say, Facebook and Twitter, … we would make a note of the sales rank in the morning and then the sales rank after [the] promotion. Obviously, that's not a perfect indicator, because ... people buy books from a wider range of [retailers].
... We also watched our own Web site's traffic. ... If it was a direct link from Facebook or Twitter or YouTube right back to us, and they purchased the book, we could track that. ... When we would send a link out in any of these promotions, ... the strategy that we had was [that] all this content we promote has a link back to a specific page on our site. And so as this content traveled out through these social media networks, we could track that link and where people were finding it. ... We watched all online channels. ... From the time that [Chelsea Green] launched [its] new social media platform strategy to, I think, something like six to eight months later, we'd seen our Web traffic double. And a year later, we'd seen online sales go up by 30 percent. ... We ... attributed the boost in sales largely to this new social media strategy.
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Excellent article and great real-world tips!
As an indie Author we too found it difficult to monitor our social media marketing efforts. As Jesse eluded to, there's not a lot of real-time data available so one has to creatively use whatever is available. In Jesse's case, he took snapshots of sales ranks before and after promotions to take the pulse of his promotional efforts.
We did the same with the release of our books but learned that a surprising amount of information could be gleaned from Amazon Sales Ranks. Although Amazon does not publicly release actual sales information, we discovered that by recording sales ranks on an hourly-basis for books we were interested in tracking, we could determine when sales occurred. Since we were our own publisher we were able to fine-tune our estimations with real sales figure data which we received from Amazon the next day.
Taking it another step further it became obvious that we could apply the same technique to track our competitors sales and subsequently determine our market share.
This was an in-house tool that we believed many indie-authors could benefit from and decided to take public. In mid July of this year we did just that. It's available, free to use at:
http://www.metricjunkie.com