Facebook and Twitter are fine, but maybe only in conjunction with Google and Bing?
If you’re an author, one of your primary goals is to sell books. Do you sometimes wonder about social media’s role in that? How much does all that tweeting and posting on Facebook really count for anyway?
Well, that question isn’t totally answered in this recent report The Virtuous Circle: The Role of Search and Social Media in the Purchase Pathway (partly undertaken by search marketing consultant Group M Search, so perhaps biased a bit?), but it does provide some stats on consumer behavior online. For instance, 58 percent of people, when looking for info on a product, start with search, while only 18 percent start with social media. Just 1 percent of people only use social media when buying (they usually end up searching a bit before the purchase).
What social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube), for now, is best at is helping eliminate particular products or brands from contention. And within the category of “social media,” user reviews (think Amazon and GoodReads and category blogs (such as a romance blogger or a thriller review site) still outweigh sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in influencing a purchase, per this report.
The future is likely a fusion of the two media, something called “social search,” which Google and Bing are starting to explore (for instance, you now see people’s tweets and profiles turn up in searches) and Facebook is trying from a different angle.
My takeaway is that if people are starting blind by searching for a book on your topic (rather than asking their social circle), better make sure you have a blog and that it has great SEO for showing up high in the search ranks for that topic. At the very least, if someone is searching for your name, you should own a website that pops up top, rather than another blog popping up that’s merely talking about you. Heck, even a Wikipedia page would be good to have since they show up high in search (since you’re not supposed to write those yourself, I could write it for you).
Meanwhile, social media is only growing in importance in its role as hyped-up word-of-mouth advertising, which, as we all know, is one of the best ways to sell a book. So you’re not off the hook for having a presence on Facebook and Twitter, since you’d better part of a conversation that’s about you and your books.
For more on social search, watch this short video from Google:
