Instead of just passively reading what comes across my computer screen, I recently decided to dive in and look at the research and the numbers and figure out what is really going on under the surface.
I took at look at the common beliefs many of us have about social media marketing and lined those up with what the numbers tell us.
What I found staggered me.
In this article I’m going to walk through 3 of the most common beliefs we have about social media marketing and show how each one is a myth. Then I’m going to share with you 2 ways to use social media marketing that have a real impact on growing your authors platform and successfully launching a book.
Let’s get started.
MYTH #1: A BIG SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIENCE = BIG BOOK SALES
Awhile back, in an interview specifically for authors, Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Jab Jab Jab, Right Hook and Crushing It made the claim that if a fiction writer started up Twitter and/or Instagram accounts for their book’s characters it would be the difference between selling 200 copies of their book and selling 25,000 copies of their book.
The problem is, there is no evidence to back up a claim like this.
In my work over the last year with dozens of top bestselling authors, many of which of large social media followings, I’ve never heard or seen anything close to this happening. I’d be extremely surprised if there is a single author who could show you even 1000 extra sales by creating Twitter accounts for their book’s characters.
So many social media marketing experts love to talk about the effectiveness of social media marketing for authors yet never back it up with real numbers, experiments, and case studies.
I have personally tested the effectiveness of social media marketing with my clients. These aren’t tests on the scale of my Twitter following of sub–6000. These are tests with people who are connected to hundreds of thousands and even millions of people.
Here are few examples:
I worked with a client that had over 160,000 Twitter followers. We tracked the sales in promoting his book on the platform and it resulted in less than 400 sales.
An author friend had someone with well over 1 million Twitter followers promote his book and it resulted in no noticeable bump in book sales.
In multiple tests across many social media accounts, it’s a normal thing to get well under 1% – more like 0.25% – of your followers or fans to take action on a given update. This is just clicking on a link, much less converting to a sale. (Try it yourself with the service bit.ly to see how many people click on your links.)
Also, not to continue picking on Gary Vaynerchuk, but when his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook came out, I did a bit of simple arithmetic.
At the time, here were his social media numbers:
Twitter – 1,016,311
Facebook – 147,604
Instagram – 34,563
LinkedIn – 152,735
Pinterest – 15,778
Through those five platforms, that was 1,366,991 connections.
(Stop and think about the daunting task of building that kind of following on social media.)
Now consider this: in the first week of sales for Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary sold about 25,000 copies (according to Nielson BookScan). If you take out all the other promotion he did – the dozens of interviews, the appearances on NPR, CNN, Huffington Post, etc – and assume all of the book sales came through social media, that’s still only a 1.82% conversion rate.
That means for every one book sale, he needed 55 connections on social media (again, assuming every single sale came through social media).
Now consider your own social media. Think through how much time you’re spending on it in hopes that it turns into book sales and do the math to see how many book sales are going to result.
It gets worse.
Read more here.
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