@ChelseaGreen Has 2,350 Followers. Here’s Why.
by Jesse McDougall, Web Editor, Chelsea Green
Other book publishers often ask me, “How do we market our books on Twitter?” My answer: “You don’t.”
The fastest route to failing on Twitter is to view it as a marketing channel. Twitter is not a platform, a social network, or a website for businesses to plaster with advertisements. It is a world, populated by real people. If your offerings are authentic and interesting, you’ll be rewarded with retweets and new followers. If your offerings are not offerings at all, but one-way, top-down, controlled-message requests for money, action, time, etc., you’ll be ignored.
At Chelsea Green, we don’t use (and don’t want to use) Twitter to market our books. Instead, we use it to interact with our community, learn about our audience, and add what we can to the ongoing discussions about our niche, sustainable living. We use Twitter to…
- Learn from the Community. The main thing we do on Twitter is listen. We learn a great deal about community mood, upcoming trends, interesting news, and influential people. We find and vet possible book topics all day long.
- Network. Through Twitter, we’ve been able to meet and interact with some of the top green editors and writers in the world. (Hi all!) We meet knowledgeable folks from magazines, blogs, TV shows, other publishing houses, and radio. It’s also a great way to search for future authors.
- Get Feedback. Twitter gives us instantaneous feedback from our followers. If we’re waffling on what to title a book, we can log onto Twitter and just ask its likely audience.
- Have Fun. In our “Ask the Expert” question series, we invite our followers to submit questions to our authors. We select one to pass on to the author. We post the question’s answer on our blog and send the questioner a free copy of the author’s latest book. This gets authors involved, connects readers to our online community, and gets our books out into the world.
We also run a contest every Wednesday at 3 PM EST. Each of our books’ website pages has a “Tweet this Book!” link, so our visitors have an easy way to send out a pre-formatted book recommendation to their followers on Twitter. During the contest, we invite our Twitter community to come to our site, browse for a book they’d like to win, and then send the recommendation out to their followers. We track the responses and the tenth person to send a recommendation wins the book they’ve recommended. It’s very straightforward, but a lot of fun. We’re able to reach 14,000+ people in four minutes. Through our interactions on Twitter we receive about 1,000 new visitors to our web site each week. This is a nice benefit of our discussions with the folks on Twitter. When we offer quality content that’s pertinent to the current discussion, people forward it around.
Our website traffic is up 100% over this month last year, and online sales across all our channels were up 35% in 2008. Our growth in sales, site traffic, and audience is not the result of a newfangled social media marketing tactic. It is the result of meeting like-minded folks. Twitter has allowed us to establish Chelsea Green as a community source for quality content.
