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| Nail clipper in the sky (Photo credit: adrian8_8) |
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| Twitter In Real Life Cartoon by HubSpot (Photo credit: HubSpot) |
Perhaps not all 2000 followers were reached, but surely a few would buy! In the advertising industry, a CTR or "click through rate" of 0,2% is considered good. It used to be much higher in the 1990s: around 3%. By 2011 it's reportedly come down to between 0,1% and 0,3%. So I should have expected to sell at least 4 copies, right? How many did I sell as a result of the campaign? One. And I'm not sure that sale had anything to do with Twitter, because it was a Goodreads author's purchase, and he emailed me saying he regretted he'd opened his email too late and hadn't caught the offer in time before the price raise (yes, I had sent a message around to my friends on Goodreads as well).
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| Twitter Addiction (Photo credit: dewaldp) |
Could it be that the CTR is even lower than 0,1%? Are we suffering from marketing fatigue? Personally, I think we are. Have you EVER bought a book on the basis of a tweet on Twitter? I know I haven't. I don't even download free books on my Kindle anymore, I have way too many, more than I can ever hope to read over the next five years! No, I should correct that: I still download a very few books, mostly from authors that I'd like to explore. But quite frankly, the ability Amazon gives me of downloading a free sample of a book is plenty good enough for me. I don't need whole free books!
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| Christmas Will Never Be The Same Because of Twitter [cartoon] (Photo credit: methodshop.com) |
But I don't plan to let my new novel A Hook in the Sky go free, don't bank on it! I worked hard at it, it took me two years to polish it to the point where I felt I could publish it. In short, it represents a big slice of my own life, I've invested everything into it (mind you, it's not autobiographical at all, but it's still me, my fictional self). And that is not worth nothing! At $5.99, I still consider it a steal!
Now should I go on Twitter with that sort of message: A HOOK is a steal? Certainly not! I'm through with book promotions on Twitter. What about you? How do you feel about Twitter, do you view it as an effective marketing instrument? Has it worked for you? I'd be curious to know!
To help you to answer (in case you don't feel like commenting), here's a poll:
Comments
The way to have success on Twitter is by sharing other people's content first. Don't even think about promoting anything.
Are you making those connections? Are you building those relationships? When you do that and people RT your message, their audience will trust them because they KNOW they won't promote junk. Understand?
Just promoting your product will not bring you any sales but if you promote the right way, you'll make your quota.
Sorry you didn't have much luck with this particular campaign. Perhaps you need to check out my post that I share how to have success on Twitter with affiliate products. I know this would work for you as well.
~Adrienne
No, Adrienne, I'm afraid I'm following EXACTLY what you say and have done so for 2 full years (which is why I do have so many followers and most of them stay faithful: I have very few people who unfollow!)
Moreover, I am CONVINCED that Twitter is GREAT to meet people, to connect, to make friends! It's just NOT good for selling. That is really the point of my post.
And Carmen, I'm sure you're right: what works for you is evidently a COMBINATION of SM networks: not just Twitter but all the others, FB, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, Goodreads, Shelfari, The Reading Room, YouTube etc...The choice is vast and quite clearly you need to choose what works best for you! And all of it should be tied to your blog. No question, the combination works, you are the living proof!
That still leaves Twitter as a very minor means for marketing if you take it by itself...
Actually, I do not believe that you can sell books through advertising campaigns anywhere (and not just on Twitter), no matter how subtle or well-prepared they may be. We all know that books are primarily sold by word of mouth. If Twitter can be turned into your "word of mouth" and create the needed buzz for sales, that's great! I'm still waiting for someone on this thread to tell me that it works that way, that he or she has actual proof that it does!
I suspect however that if you're a BIG author (say Paulo Coehlo who has 2 million Twitter followers), then Twitter does work for you: you announce that your latest book is coming on said date and everybody rushes to buy it!
I tried a targetted campaign via Twitter during the month of September, balancing marketing tweets with cross promotion and personal interaction using a rule of thirds. Not only did my follower numbers increase but my sales jumped 4 fold.
I used to struggle with the notion of marketing on Twitter but I longer concern myself with whether people are annoyed with my Tweets or not. I don't regard Twitter as a portal for 'maintaining relationships'. If you want to foster a relationship with me, sure - let's meet on Twitter and sure let's cross promote on Twitter but let's interact via each others blogs and FB Author pages where the potential for discussion is far greater. When I converse, I prefer to do it in more than 140 characters.
I've met some great people on Twitter and have enjoyed lasting friendships as a result but let's not kid ourselves - Twitter is actually quite an effective marketing tool, if leveraged in the right way.
Some expect to make personal connections and wish more contacts could be made (right Laura?). So marketing efforts are definitely not welcome!
Others want to have fun and get info of use to themselves (through links to interesting material, be them pictures, videos or articles).Sometimes they react and share what they like, but the number of shares even for really good material is incredibly small. That suggests that people actually do NOT read their Twitter stream!Indeed Twitter often looks like an exchange between deaf and blind people!
Others still (right Dean?) use it for savvy marketing based on hashtags and a delicate balancing act between sharing info and promotion - and yes Dean, I use hashtags to direct my tweets, and yes, I apply a rule of thumb: never more than 1/3 of tweets directed at my own stuff. Indeed I believe I do even less than that.
And yes, I agree with you, proper marketing campaigns don't last 24 hours: this was the "crowning touch" to a 3 week marketing campaign (done on several sites, including FB and Linked In and Goodreads). I guess I should have made that clear in my post.
Well now it's clear!
That's why I don't think Twitter works very well for marketing.It should have been the "crowning touch", the cherry on the cake and it wasn't.
Dean are you sure Twitter is the real cause, the one major source for your sales success? Surely you're on FB and other places too?
This is the trouble your see: it's almost impossible to figure out what Twitter's role is exactly, given the fact that everyone who's active on the net uses more than one SM network!
I'm assuming that you had built up a reputation and following, otherwise the test would not be an especially fair one on you or them.
It's a slow burn operation but some things do work.
And I completely agree here with everyone who's pointed out that Twitter is good for connecting! Personally, I think it's only good in the first few moments - after that, 140 characters aren't enough to keep up a dialogue! FB or Google+ are much better, and a good old-fashioned email is still the best!
I don't have definitive metrics on Twitter.
All of which goes to show that Twitter is not really a proper medium for marketing! Marketing requires you to reach out to the greatest number of people. Marketing requires that you sell something. Marketing requires that you move fast from one product to the next. None ofthis has anything to do with building up friendships! To become friends takes time, it takes love, it takes trust in one another. Any whiff of money and sales will break down that trust...
-Sage Aumick