Social Media Spotlight : Socially Active

How Chronicle Books increased its Web site traffic and gained more than 14,000 followers on Twitter in less than a year.

As for other measures of success, Chronicle also noted a strong increase in 2009 over the previous year in the number of unique visitors to its Web site, according to de la Mare, and Facebook and Twitter now are two of the top 10 referring sites back to ChronicleBooks.com. "That's significant because it means [those sites are] driving a huge amount of traffic back to our site," she says. "As far as our overall goals and strategies to build our audience, that's a very clear indicator to us that this has been very successful."

Planning Ahead
Chronicle's main social networking pages, such as on Facebook and Twitter, were established under the Chronicle Books brand; those pages are then used to help promote various titles and authors. "I'll work with marketing to come up with a specific social media campaign that will be integrated into their overall marketing plan. … I work very closely with [a title's] marketing manager to map out the schedule of promotions and giveaways, and what kinds of tweets we would do throughout the duration of their big publicity push," explains de la Mare. She also will tweet about upcoming author events.

"Then there's just the day-to-day, on-the-fly, just sort of monitoring the chatter, monitoring the trends, and then finding and posting information that's going to be relevant," she adds.

Behind Its 'Change the World …' Campaign
The effort behind the title "Change the World for Ten Bucks: Small Actions x Lots of People = Big Change," which Chronicle published in March 2009, is one example of how the publisher utilizes various social media channels. On Facebook, Chronicle created an application for the book—essentially a checklist of different things that users could do to change the world. When a user checks off an item, the application posts it to the user's news feed. "There was also a campaign on Twitter for the month of May …," says de la Mare. "Every single day in May at 10 a.m., we would send out a daily 'Change the World' tweet, and it had its own hashtag."

The book also inspired Chronicle to host a "Change the World Day," during which it closed its offices, and employees volunteered at different sites in the region. Throughout the day, employees tweeted about their experiences on Twitter and took photos that they posted to Chronicle's Flickr.com page so fans could see how they were helping to change the world.

Chronicle also relies on its authors to establish and maintain social networking pages that promote the brand and specific titles, and then interweaves those pages into the Chronicle Books social networking pages. "The authors become a really great resource for … content to populate our feeds," says de la Mare. "A lot of times the consumers are very interested in hearing directly from the authors. And we're really all about connecting people and not becoming a fortress between our publishing house and our authors."

"We definitely consider [social media] part of our overall marketing and publicity strategy. This is one prong," adds Algar. "We're really excited about being able to connect with our consumers in a way we haven't been able to before."

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