Facebook, Twitter, Ning. Online social networks are seeing huge growth and smart book marketers are joining their readers online and building communities. Random House Canada's Heather Sanderson is a hands-on practitioner with plenty of experience of what works and what's hype. In this session, Heather explains how these social media work in book marketing, gives do's and don'ts for their successful use, and lifts the hood on some real-life case studies.
Heather Sanderson, Manager, Digital Sales and Business Development, Random House of Canada
Since Facebook and Twitter are large social networks already, I’ll talk mostly about how to use these tools for marketing, and will touch very briefly on building a social network in Ning. What your authors can be doing and keys to success. But first - a very brief history.
Social networks are not new. You might recognize some of these - that started at least 10 years ago all with different business models.
There are now an endless number of social networks that you can become a part of.
So many that social networking sites now account for 10% of all internet traffic.
So once a day or once every other day is fine.
While it is important to have a company presence on facebook, your authors are a key brand - and they need to be equiped to build their own profile online.
Create discussions here for all of your authors to come and participate in.
In May 2007, Facebook opened up their platform to developers to build applications themselves. There are over 400,000 developers now building hundreds of thousands of applications.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. But really, twitter is….
By the end of 2009, there should be 18 million users on twitter. Growth is over 1000% per month.
Who should you follow? People you know and companies you like. Then people you’re interested in following.
This is where you enter your tweet.
Usre your real name - but keep it short so that when people retweet you, it all still fits.
Content can be updated quickly and easily and fed to multiple places via RSS. Instead of waiting to update your website or to send out a newsletter you can get news and info out right away. We also encourage consumers to sign up and follow us on twitter and on facebook from our newsletters and websites.
Tweetdeck - allows you to organize the people you follow into groups. Twitpic - allows you to upload photos. Hootsuite - schedule tweets in advance. Tiny URLs. Uber Twiter or Twitter berry. Twhirl allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts.
Customize Google Analytics.
People often argue that the ROI is difficult to meausre in social marketing. I would say that it’s not difficult, it’s just different.