Promoting With Social Media
Social media promotion can be a jackpot if done correctly. Getting the right image and phrasing is an art. In fact, for some, it’s a full-time job (literally!). So for those untrained in the field, it can be a daunting mystery.
Platforms like Facebook or Twitter are a great way to stay connected with fans, so launching a book series without it seemed like a poor decision. When I first released Iris, I already had an active Facebook page up and running, in addition to this blog.
I was astonished by how easily I was able to gain Facebook fans from across the world in a short amount of time with some very simple promotional techniques. Within months, I had over 2000 fans from all over the planet. Many posted on my page with comments about how eager they were to read the book or how much they liked the images or content. It was fair to say my page’s following grew rather quickly, though to my unfortunate surprise, those numbers did not directly translate to book sales.
In fact, as far as I can tell, there has been no correlation whatsoever to posting on Facebook and selling books. Even as likes increased, sales remained the same. I would go so far as to say it seems like having a Facebook page has contributed 0% to my overall readership. These people who are posting about how excited they are to read the book do not end up actually purchasing it.
Lately my page’s total number of likes has actually flattened out, despite having a few new likes every now and then. This is because over the last few days, I have seen a considerable number of fans “unliking” my page, therefore unsubscribing to my posts. It led me to wonder why these people chose to like the page in the first place.
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As you can see from the graph above, I have been carefully treading a fine line. In this particular graph, you can see that my overall likes increased by just one over the last month. It seems for every new like I gain, I lose just as many.
So what is it that causes people to unlike my Facebook page? And if there seems to be no correlation between Facebook following and sales, should it even matter?
My conclusion: people just like to “like” things. I’ve noticed that people who comment and interact with content on the Facebook page are often people who have recently liked the page for the first time. After a few days of having liked the page, those users do not often comment or interact anymore. The novelty of interacting with a new fan page has simply worn off for them.
There is an expression in social media: post often. I always thought this practice was intended to keep old fans constantly interested in the content, though now I wonder if this advice is actually intended to appeal to new fans so that they have something to see and interact with when they first “like” the page. After all, I hear stories of people who have intentionally “unliked” pages for posting too much. I guess it’s all about finding the right balance.
A few months after starting my Facebook page, I decided to start a Twitter account. As someone who has never used Twitter before, the platform was completely new to me. I have had it for a few months now and even still, I am struggling to fully understand how it works.
Twitter, from what I have learned, is more of a science. Unlike Facebook, where fans just want to interact for a brief time and forget about it, Twitter followers typically plan to stick around. I’ve been told that four tweets a day is apparently the magic number to keep people interested and to gain followers on the page.
For me, that has yet to come to fruition. I have certainly tried to stay relevant on my page, taking advantage of current hashtags and trending topics. For example, today I posted an image about #alienday and #wednesdaywisdom, which were both trending hashtags at the time.
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Despite trying to stay relevant, my page has seen very little pickup. For the longest time, it was stuck at 17 followers. It has only recently reached 21. Though this is certainly an improvement from 17, it is nothing in comparison to the 2000+ fans on my Facebook page.
Still, I wonder if all this effort is really worth it. Like Facebook, there seems to be no correlation whatsoever between Twitter interaction and sales. Even posts to links about pre-orders (on BOTH social media platforms) have not garnered a single pre-order sale thus far.
I have heard numerous success stories claiming that Facebook and Twitter are the keys to making it big. Yet for me, I cannot see how. Perhaps I am still discovering how to use these platforms. Most things come with time, after all. But I am surprised just how little impact social media seems to have.
To view the official pages for The Color of Water and Sky series, check out the following links below:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecolorofwaterandsky/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TCOWAS
