Facebook is the more big, intriguing, promising and revolutionary social media, frequented by a third of the inhabitants of the planet. Facebook grow up at rhythms astounding which will lead to an upward revision of Moore's Law. Zuck and his team look like they came from Mars: everyday ne they invent a and areas such asinformation ,E-commerce, finance, school will come soon incorporated from Facebook. After all, when there's a billion and a half people to manage, you have to make you up something for to relate always place it on new land. Otherwise, you end up like Twitter that many people still don't know how it works and do something to it because they read that it needs to be done.
This huge potentiality di Facebook è expendable for the business? Zuck and Sandberg swear by Yup and also the market ci believes so much so that Facebook's market capitalization is stellar. To us who are in the business of books and to the ebook arises spontaneously question se Facebook can be considered one resource to do know a book and a ebook e raggiungere i readers which are undoubtedly on its pages. A question which deserves a yes instinctive, But that in reality becomes a rebus after someone tries.
So we thought we'd ask one person is know the dynamics of Facebook, has many active campaigns and deals with books. It's about Michael Alvear writer, social marketing expert and author of many texts including one that feels like a must read. It has a mileage title (it must mean something!) Make A Killing On Kindle without blogging, Facebook and Twitter. The Guerrilla Marketer's Guide to Selling Your Ebook on Amazon (note how many keywords are in this title). Maybe the first act of marketing it is precisely the choice of title.
Alveat ha written extensively on work of authors to make know, On actions suitable for raggiungere this purpose and on the useless ones and recently presented the results of his reflections in a beautiful contribution on DBW which will certainly be discussed during the digital book week to be held in a few months in New York at the Hilton Midtown. From this intervention we have drawn the ideas for this conversation conducted by the ebookextra team with Michael Alveat. We present a summary. For a definitive insight into the topics covered, please refer to the ebook mentioned above.
Ebookextra [EB]: Before being sold, a book or ebook must be known unless it is by James Patterson or a high-ranking writer. We often wonder if Facebook really serves to make known, and consequently, to sell an ebook or book by a novice author, a self-published or an average-ranked writer. Is Facebook really the Swiss army knife for newcomers to the forest of storytelling?
Michael Alvear [MA]: It is of little use, many times it is an immense waste of time.
[EB]: Come on, be good!
[BUT]:Okay. It is only needed if you have at least 20 fans on Facebook. But Facebook isn't the only thing that doesn't work among those commonly thought to work for making authors and their books known. He is in good company of useless things.
[EB]: Let us guess… think Twitter or newsletters from authors and publishers.
[BUT]: Exactly to that stuff there. Let's take the newsletter. It is often mentioned as a supporting beam in the so-called author's platform. I will only refer to my own experience for brevity. Over time and with a lot of work I have managed to build a mailing list of 30 readers of which I am very proud. These are people who have somehow entered into a relationship with me and therefore know me more or less well. Of these, let's call them acquaintances, only 30% open the newsletter and if I'm lucky, 1% of this 30% buy something. After sending a newsletter to my 30 addresses, sales on Amazon barely budge. Often the sales graph line remains flat a week after the newsletter is sent. It takes me a couple of days to prepare a newsletter and the Mail Chimp subscription costs me something. I'd better go to the park and eat ice cream.
[EB]: Forget the park and ice cream, which are always a great thing to do. If we don't misunderstand your speech, which is also somewhat confirmed by our experience, it is this. You mean that only an author who is already widely known in the reading community benefits from the so-called author's social platform. That it takes time and above all success to reap the benefits in terms of sales. Which of course doesn't mean that new authors shouldn't set out to build it. So the message we can send to authors who aren't already celebrities shouldn't be ambiguous: don't expect too much from this tool, rather consider it an investment for the future, a sort of gymnasium to prepare for the competition.
[BUT]: Sure, it takes years, investment, and a lot of hard work taken from other businesses to build a platform that converts into sales. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better for novice writers to spend their time writing and improving their storytelling skills, investing, for example, in training and an editor.
[EB]: A sensible speech that brings the author right into the arms of a publisher. It should be the publisher to bear the investment to promote the book and stimulate sales. How do you see the role of the editor? Does it still make sense in the age of Amazon and self-publishing platforms?
[BUT]: Yes, it makes sense to the extent that the publisher financially supports the author who is short of means. I see him as an entrepreneur who has the necessary capital and the expertise to manage the business that arises around a creative work. As for its ability to make a difference in making the authors' works known, I have my doubts. I have published with three traditional publishers. They've been very good: they've had me interviewed by at least 30 radio stations, I've been on multiple talk shows, I've given hundreds of presentations, and I've spent countless hours on Facebook and Twitter. If I were to tell you that the effort was worth it, I'd be kidding you.
[EB]: So you really scare us though. Do you mean that the traditional means of promoting a book have become completely ineffective, that going on radio and television is useless and that presentations do not pay for the cost of the plane and the hotel? What can be done today that can work?
[BUT]: Read my book! [laughs loudly]. As you can see I'm always in promotion mode. There are a dozen things you can and must do on Amazon to really see the difference in sales before and after you do them. You make a presentation and nothing happens, do one of these 12 actions and the sales multipliers start activating. Everything else is a waste of time especially blogging, Twitter and Facebook. Just as all traditional book promotion tactics are a waste of time. If you don't work well on Amazon, where 80% of sales are made, the latter will remain anemic.
[EB]: You tell us something that we share but that the vast majority of authors ignore. Many consider Amazon as an online bookstore like many others, a rather cheap place where readers go to buy what they are looking for at the best available price. They enter, search, buy, exit and forget and Amazon technically manages the process by reducing it to a click. And instead Amazon is much, much more: it is a real ecosystem within which you can engage and develop a very sophisticated relationship with the reader at the end of which the latter is guided by Amazon as Dante is by Virgil in the Divine Comedy. And like any ecosystem Amazon is a world in itself and can be immune to what happens outside. It's the ecosystem where the readers really are, and therefore being able to get to know it and use it to its fullest potential can truly make the difference between anemia and a sales hemorrhage. Which does not mean that the other means are zero and for this reason we would like to go back to talking about Facebook. You say it takes at least 20 fans to garner some results. That's a good number! Can you tell us how you came to get this figure out of the hat?
[BUT]: First let me say I agree with you on Amazon as a real ecosystem and I might add, complex ecosystem. I come to the 20 thousand fans. It's not an official number, it's a number I deduce from my many years of experience on Facebook. Considering that the average number of friends per person is 350 (in the USA), I wonder how a half-known or half-known author can manage to reach 20 fans. I have been a guest on HBO, on Channel 4 in the UK, I am well known in my environment, which is an important niche, and in five years I have amassed 5 fans. What no one really says is how hard it is to build a real fan base on Facebook. It is so difficult that, for example, many companies hire specialized companies to carry out this task. Then where these companies find fans is a mystery that is best left uninvestigated.
[EB]: In fact, with spontaneous or organic actions, you don't go far both in acquiring new fans and in getting the posts to a significant number of subjects. To reach more people, you have to pay, because Facebook charges to reach customers and get likes. On average, without disbursements, Facebook lets a post reach a maximum of 16% of its fan base. Read this post about it.
[BUT]: Exactly and whether you have the minimum wage of 350 fans or you have 20, you have to put your wallet in order to reach them all with any post. And if you make more posts a day, then the matter is no longer about the wallet, but about the bank account. Once I was having lunch with a New York Times reporter who praised the paper's 2 million fans. When I told him that the NYT could only reach one-fifth he was shocked and was convinced only after calling his boss on 2th street who confirmed that things were as I had just told him and that the "Times" pay only to promote the most important stories. To the other stories, left to the organic mechanisms, it happens that, of the 400 million friends declared on the Facebook page, they are allowed to reach "only" 117 thousand people, who are already a small army in themselves. But this is the NYTimes which has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes. Simply many people, even very active on social media, do not know these facts and think that Facebook does not have a billionaire business to carry on and increase and that its mission is to make their friends, like Santa Claus, happy. However, … let's also assume that with hard work, deprivation and attention deficit to anything other than Facebook, an author manages to reach 3 followers, at which point he has to start paying Facebook to reach them all. If he doesn't pay, he barely reaches 20 and to reach 150 he has to make XNUMX.
[EB]: Shots of dizzying numbers. Do you have some concrete examples to tell us about to support this thesis.
[BUT]: Of course I have. I have a book that has been permanently in the top 10 best-selling book in its category for the past twelve months, often number one. I spent $60 on a Facebook news feed post with the aim of reaching my 5000 followers plus 8000 other interested users. My post was so effective that I had results that Facebook itself complimented saying my campaign performed 93% better than average. In fact, I had 581 clicks on the photo, 382 click throughs, 2 likes on the page, 188 likes on the post, 20 comments, 23 shares. Overall, there were 1196 actions and the paid reach reached 13 users. For those unfamiliar with these kinds of stats, suffice it to say that I was seen by 13 people.
[EB]: Damn, you bingoed for just $60. Then Facebook works great, nothing but! And what conversions have you had.
[BUT]: I sold 3 ebooks.
[EB]: Come on Michael, $60 is a tiny investment in advertising. It's the one who pays an advertiser to Uber to be taken by the customer. You can't expect miracles even from a conjurer like Facebook. Maybe with those 60 dollars you'd better give 6 copies of the ebook to friends so you'd make it go up a dozen positions in the standings. What attracts and amazes is the number of people you have reached with the post, 15 is a good figure. Which brings us to another level of reflection which is this: it's not so much the number of people you reach, but the engagement that takes place with these people, in the case of your post it was very light and in any case not such as to push anyone to reach for the wallet. Maybe you need more engagement to get some sales conversion. An engagement that perhaps is not possible on Facebook. Perhaps there is a need to put more money. What about it
[BUT]: Precisely this is what I thought and did with one of my subsequent books, Eat It Later: Mastering Self Control & The Slimming Power Of Postponement, who found himself competing not in a niche category like the previous one, but in a heavyweight category that caters to a mass market and which crosses all genders, ages and income groups. I invested $334 to reach 13 people interested in losing weight. With my new campaign, I reached 12.558 people with 583 click throughs. Sales… and I feel like crying, zero. I say zero split.
[EB]: Let's cry together then, because we know that you have other campaigns running and that the results are roughly these. So we ask you: why is Facebook so little useful for selling books? Maybe you don't know how to do it and it's your problem to figure out how. Perhaps Sheryl Sandberg would graciously point this out to you. That's why there's a Facebook team that travels the world to teach advertisers and advertisers how to design effective campaigns. Perhaps they are just too advanced for us earthlings. What about it.
[BUT]: That could be anything, but my firm belief is that Facebook is of little use for selling anything.
[EB]: Going back to books, our impression is that, fundamentally, people don't go to Facebook to hear about books or receive sponsored posts about books. He's on Facebook to do other things, his head is somewhere else. It's a bit like trying to sell books at the carnival, some may stop at the stall, but many go straight to the Ferris wheel and rides. There are far more powerful attractions than the three-bulb-lit bookstand. I remember that when I was a boy I had sold quite a few comics by setting up a stall near the stationery shop which also sold newspapers and magazines. I had a lot of misconceptions after this unexpected sales boom. When the time came for the town fair I moved the same booth to the amusement park, but to my amazement no one stopped there, yet there were also the same people passing by, and that experience was just a waste of time. I often think about it because that's when I discovered marketing. That distant experience reminds me a little of the comparison between what happens having the banquet on Amazon and having it on Facebook.
[BUT]: If you don't try you don't learn, said President Roosevelt. To what you've said, I'd add that the click through of paid Facebook posts is terrifying. In my first very successful campaign it was 3%. A result that they tell me is spectacular because the click through on Facebook is less than two tenths of 1%. But there is an even more depressing statistic.
[EB]: Oh my God, have mercy on us.
[BUT]: Only 13% of the less than 1% of people who click on the post link to land on Amazon make a purchase. This is a statistic elaborated by Millward Brown Digital, a site that measures web traffic. There is, however, another fact that perhaps is decisive for our discussion. It's all about the conversion rate of Amazon Prime customers.
The conversion rate of Prime users on Amazon is 74%. 20 times as much as the average rate of other e-commerce.
[EB]: Everything originates and returns to Amazon as the Indian chief would have said in Dance with wolves.
[BUT]: Actually yes. Consider that the conversion rate of an Amazon Prime customer is 74% [this is the customer who pays 99 euros/dollars a year not to pay Amazon's TV shipping costs and to access the service, only in the USA streaming of music, movies and programs]. If you can get a Prime customer on your book listing, you have a 74% chance that they will buy it. But Prime customers are caught on Amazon, if you go to Facebook or social media to look for them it's like looking for the Holy Grail. But if we leave Prime it's pain. Also according to this statistic, the conversion rate of the top 500 e-commerce sites in the United States is 3%. On Amazon, the conversion rate of non-Prime customers rises to 13%, four times as much. The Prime customer is worth 20 times a generic customer. According to a forecast by Macquarie investment, half of American households will have a Prime contract in 2020. That's why Amazon is the engagement ground with readers.
[EB]: Basically what you say to the authors is this: don't waste time and resources on Facebook or building a platform to relate to readers, rather concentrate your resources on writing and on understanding the mechanisms that regulate the Amazon ecosystem so as to be able to make them pervasive in all your future actions.
As for the ruling on the effectiveness of Facebook, well, we defer to the mercy of the court.
