Suspicions confirmed: Twitter and Facebook are time-sucking wastes of your marketing energy.
Here’s a fellow that I stumbled upon at (where else?) Twitter: a gent named Derek Haines, who not only mounts endless social media and other types of campaigns to market his bookoids, but who largely advises against the same.
To stuff his message into a nutshell, he says that the sole purpose of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and waypoints is to drive readers to your blogs.
Flogging your books on Twitter, as so many people do, may or may not be a waste of time (his opinion is mixed; I’d suggest it is a waste of time, but only from a subjective viewpoint: my brain filters out anything that looks like an ad). Post your content and your message not on Twitter but on your blogsite. Then at the bleatfests, post cogent “hooks” of reasonably entertaining or useful messages with links to your site.
Furthermore, Haines suggests that Google+ is far more effective than Twitter as a way to build visibility, because Google puts (correctly designed) Google+ bleats in its search rankings. Apparently it does not do that with all the other social bleating.
That notwithstanding, says he, what you need is not brain-banging time-sucking social media campaigns. What you need is a decent mailing list.
Dayum!
Do you have a clue to how much time this will save? I have been wasting SO goddamn much time on Twitter! Ugh, ugh, and ugh!
And you know, down at the Small Business Administration, one of the mentor/instructors remarked that for any given small business owner, an hour of one’s time is worth (hang onto your hats, folks), TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS.
In that scenario, I’ve probably lost $78,000± over the past few weeks, diddled away on trying to make an impression in the bleatfest of social media.
So, here’s what I think to be the case, when it comes to marketing b2c: business to customer:
- Get on Google+
- Maintain a Twitter presence, if you must
- Build one or two excellent blogs, in which you post content that someone, somewhere wants to read.
- Advertise the product on those blogs as an apparent afterthought (heh!)
- Use Google+ and Twitter to direct people to your blogsites.
- Once they’re at the site, provide them with useful information or entertainment.
- Have ads for the product available at the website
- Provide mailing list sign-ups for readers, and send worthwhile content to those who agree to subscribe.
- If what you’re selling b2c is books, build a platform at Amazon Author and Goodreads…and what? Yes: use them to direct people to your blogsites.
Duh!
This is SO much less work, SO much less tedium, and SO much easier than dorking with Twitter and FB four or five or six times a day…it defies belief.
It is after 10 p.m. I have devoted the requisite 3 hours to marketing, 3 hours to editing, 3 hours to writing, and then some, then some, and then some. And so, my friends, to bed. Watch this site for more and better content!
I have used all three and out of the three, I’ve had the most traffic directed to my blog via Twitter. Facebook filters stuff so that nobody sees it, and have made it clear that if you want your stuff to be seen, you have to pay to play. So I’ve limited my presence there. Google+ seems to work well but I don’t think it has a fraction of the audience that FB or Twitter does, which is a problem. You might get a higher engagement rate from G+ than Twitter, but if you’re only getting a fraction of the potential audience, you might have limited upside.
I guess I’m not arguing with your strategy, but just know that it’s one of many, and also know that I think while FB or Twitter might not be where you want to concentrate, I think minimizing either could be going too far in the other direction.
It’s very hard to assess these tools, isn’t it?
One thing I gather from reading other self-publishers’ sites is that one person will have x experience with A, B, or C medium and another, apparently following a similar strategy, will have y experience. It may depend on the luck of the draw: who happens to “follow” you at any given site.
Do you see any connection between engagement rate and sales? That is, if G+ is in fact getting people to engage with you better than, say, Twitter or FB, are those people more likely to buy your product than people lurking on Twitter will?
I still think that probably the best tool is going to be a mail list. It may also be that public speaking and face-to-face engagement will be more effective than virtual contacts on social media.
It would seem to me the marketing channels that are most effective would depend on your target audience. For example, my Mother (50s) uses email extensively but doesn’t see the point of FB or twitter or the likes. I (early 30s) use FB, but I rarely look at email outside of work nor do I pay attention to twitter. My staff at work (late 20s) hate using email even at work (other than verbal communication we frequently communicate via text), and they have largely moved on from FB in favor of platforms like Instagram and Reddit. Three different demographics, three very different interaction models with communication/social media.
@MD: That is EXACTLY so! You just put your finger on two huge issues. First, different age groups respond to social media differently and have different (strongly held!) preferences; and second, those preferences change over time as new platforms evolve.
FaceBook had a very youthful demographic when it started. Apparently those people stayed with it…and aged! Now their demographic is 30s-ish, and meanwhile younger people are fond of newer platforms. Pinterest is very popular among the young pups, and we’re told Periscope is the Big New Thing.
I suppose as you reach middle age, you figure you only have so many more years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes left, and you really DON’T want to diddle them away on time-sucks like Facebook and Twitter. I mean…wtf????
Even blogging is time-consuming, but I see it as an extension of the journals I always used to write — started write when I was ten or twelve years old. It’s kinda cool that you can not only write every day as a kind of ten-finger exercise, but that you can write to an audience of sorts. It’s not good for writers to write only to themselves: the point of writing is the reader. So for some of us, that makes the blog an almost ideal medium…which some among the great unwashed would like to see go away.
I think that’s what’s needed is to figure out where the LARGEST part of Camptown Races’ readership is likely to be; then figure out what platform attracts a lot of those folks, and use that.
But… But — really, given the fluidity of these media and the fact that a mailing list is many times more effective than any social media platform, it seems to me one is better off putting the bulk of one’s effort into writing an engaging newsletter and sending that out once a month, rather than spending uncountable hours farting around with Twitter and the like. The highest and best use of the short-form social media, it seems to me, is to point folks to a blog where you can provide high-quality content alongside the opportunity to see your poduct.
I hope…