How Can Publishers Successfully Use Social Media to Sell Books?

Extra: What social media strategies sell books without annoying or alienating consumers?
McDougall: ... This really is an important tip that people coming from a traditional marketing background often get wrong. These social media platforms are not one-way platforms. They are not TV. They are not radio. They are not newspapers. The people who are on these platforms expect a high degree of interactivity. So when companies get into these platforms and launch their various marketing initiatives on these platforms, if they approach it with a top-down, one-way controlled message approach, they'll be turning off customers and annoying people. ... Small or independent book publishers have a real opportunity here, because all of these sites thrive on content and the discussion around content.

... I would say the best strategy for going out and increasing the awareness about your books, your authors, your company and your content is to set up accounts on these various channels, and then go out and just listen. ... So if you're, for example, a cookbook publisher, go out onto Twitter and join the foodie groups out there. Same with Facebook. Listen to the conversation going on. And then, when you get an idea of who's involved, who the major influencers are in this discussion, jump in—not as a marketer, but as another person who's interested in the discussion. This is where you can interject your content, your books, your authors, and say, “Hey, if you're interested in pickling, we have this great book out with wonderful pickling recipes from so-and-so. You might want to check that out.” ...

Extra: What sort of cross-channel marketing is necessary to support social media marketing? Should landing pages be optimized for specific promotions? Should promotional video be involved?
McDougall: ... A publisher's Web site ... should function as the hub of the social media strategy. And all the content produced, excerpted or collected from authors should be published through the publisher's Web site first, just as a means of putting it all out there where Google can find it. ... From that main hub of your Web site, this content can then be placed on Facebook, on Twitter. If you have videos, you probably put them on YouTube first and then embed them in your site. ... In terms of cross-channel marketing, I think you should use all of these multimedia services to bolster one another. For example, your Facebook page will point to your YouTube videos. Your Twitter feed will point to your Facebook page, back to your blog, back to the blog posts from your authors that appear on other blogs. ...