Building A Social Hive

Is all that tweeting, posting and sharing worth the time it takes? We spoke with publishers and marketing experts whose social media strategies have yielded loyal followings of eager book-buyers. Our savvy sources share 25 ways to make your social efforts more effective in 2014.

Dan Blank
Founder, We Grow Media
1. Put Quality Over Quantity
How can publishers maximize their social media? Focus on better serving their existing relationships, readers and customers, not on obsessing about growing “followers,” “fans,” “connections,” and “pins” to arbitrary levels.

2. Be Personal
Social media is about the way human beings communicate and establish trust with each other. When you lose that sense of the person behind the social media profile, you miss the entire point of social media. I don’t care if you have a bazillion followers, I care about how well you connect with your audience on a human level

3. Learn About Readers
Often, when I work with an author, we spend a lot of time on audience research—truly understanding who his readers are, gathering qualitative and quantitative info/data on them, and then ensuring that we judge success like this: not how many more followers did we get each week on Twitter, but what one new thing did we learn about the author’s ideal readers this week. When you know this, suddenly, marketing has a clearer strategy. For example: how to engage on social media, and who with; whether to do live events, what type, and where; expectations around book sales; and so much else.

Jason Ashlock
Strategist, Movability
We track all our links, and regularly review to measure what’s proving most effective and what’s merely talking to ourselves. And we’ve found four elements that are generally helpful, if not earth-shatteringly original.

4. Join The Conversation
First, contextual tweets are far more likely to be clicked on, shared and favorited than simply promotional tweets. By contextual, I mean tweets shared while already in conversation with others about a topic or event. The clear lesson here: engagement drives engagement. It is so tempting to just fling thoughts into the ether, but if you don’t engage directly, that’s exactly where they’re going.