Building A Social Hive

9. Formulate A Plan
While you’re fixing up your home page, step even further away from social media and create an actual plan for reaching your audiences. This will involve understanding your business goals and strategies, your customers, and how you market and sell in this social world we live in. Then you must ensure that all of your marketing is aligned with those goals, strategies, customers and sales. It’s not about getting on Facebook or Twitter or Vine, or creating a content program using video or imagery, but about how you can appropriately use each of these tools to drive your business forward.

10. Socialize With Authors
The third thing you need to do is to partner with and leverage your authors. Every publisher has at least some authors that are doing some amazing things across the social platforms. Few publishers, however, are effectively concentrating the content these authors are producing for their audiences, and then amplifying that concentrated stream of content across their own social programs. Doing this can truly drive discoverability, engagement and revenue.

Adam Salomone
Associate Publisher, The Harvard CommonPress (HCP)
11. Use Social Media to Amplify
My feeling about social media (in all its forms, but also when it comes to promoting books) is that any brand has to realize that as much as social media allows for a “me-centric” approach to marketing and messaging, it is less about any one individual brand or identity and more about the network effect that can be used to amplify any marketing message.

12. Be Passionate
When I think about how closely we work with bloggers who are passionate about our books, or engaging our authors who are themselves brands representing their own books, we end up playing the strongest role when we bring all those pieces together via our social media platforms, rather than trying to act as a one-way street pushing out news of our books. Ultimately, consumers want to hear from other individuals and people who are real and not just brand representatives. I also find that we make a strong impact when acting as individuals with the people we reach on social media (HCP president Bruce Shaw’s Facebook and Twitter followings are examples of that).