Jay Leonard
While social media itself is usually free, the effort you put into social media (what we can call the “payment”) does make a difference.
Until now, although I have believed the above statement to be true, I have not had a clear picture of this principle at work.
In the past few days, starting with the launch of my new ebook TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK, I have now had a clear view of the effects of a person’s “payment” on social media results.
And while this blog post discusses book marketing results in connection with social media, the observations are applicable to everyone using social media to promote a product, service or company.
My social media “payment” experience:
On the day that TOP TIPS was first available on Amazon’s Kindle, I started a discussion thread in the LinkedIn Book Marketing group I founded and manage. I offered a free Kindle mobi format of the ebook in exchange for consideration of writing a review on the book’s Amazon page if the reader liked the book.
(Side note for people contemplating writing reviews on Amazon: Reviews on Amazon do not need to be long. In fact, I personally believe that shorter reviews are more likely to be read.)
I got a large number of immediate responses — much more than I anticipated — and I gladly emailed a Kindle mobi format to all the people who responded.
Then I started tracking sales on my KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) dashboard. Even though I had given the ebook away to perhaps 100 people, sales were coming in as excellent reviews were added to the book’s page.
I also tweeted and posted on Facebook about this ebook, the reviews for it, and the categories in which this ebook was doing well. Sales were good for a new ebook by a non-famous author.
Now for the last 2-3 days I have been busy doing a final edit on my 87-year-old father’s third book of humorous short stories. I have not done any social media updates about TOP TIPS.
And the result of my “non-payment” is clear: no new sales of the ebook.
In addition, the book’s ranking in categories has dropped. At one point while I was using social media in connection with the book, the book was #1 in the category of questions and answers.
As I write this post, it has dropped to 23 in the category of questions and answers. Plus the book is only 74 in the category of authorship, although the book was doing much better in this category when I used social media.
(Another side note about Amazon: While Amazon’s algorithms are secret, it is known or at least “suspected” that the rankings are based on hourly sales. Thus, as sales dropped off for TOP TIPS, the book’s rankings in these categories dropped.)
In my experience, this is a dramatic representation of how social media makes a difference. If you have social media accounts but have not been making sufficient “payment” as part of an overall online marketing plan, it’s time to re-consider your online marketing strategy.
If you are interested in the ebook TOP TIPS, which has a lot of good information applicable to promoting any product or service online, click here to check out the book now.
The Kindle ebook is $2.99 (you can get a free Kindle app from Amazon for almost any electronic device) and the ebook is free for Amazon Prime members who own a Kindle.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Great article! It really is amazing the kind of influence you can have with clear, consistant online marketing through social media. Thanks for sharing!!
And thank you, Megan, for leaving this nice comment!