Ten Ways for Booksellers to Leverage Social Media

Clayton Wehner - Blue Train EnterprisesM: 0438 925 613 E: contact@bluetrainenterprises.com.au

This presentation will be available at: http://www.bluetrainenterprises.com.au/aba

A short video to start…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0EnhXn5boM&feature=player_embedded

What is Social Media? Social media is ‘media designed to be

disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques’

Blogs, micro-blogging, social networking, video/file sharing, wikis, social bookmarking, community sites and more

Today I am going to talk about ten ways that you can use social media in your bookselling business…

1. Dip your toe in & join the party… Join the online book community – learn, discuss

and share info with like-minded people Get a Facebook account and become a ‘fan’ of

book industry pages Get a Twitter account and ‘follow’ book

industry people Get a LinkedIn account and ‘connect’ with your

business associates, suppliers, clients etc Get a feed reader (Google Reader) and

subscribe to industry blogs and RSS feeds

There’s a conversationgoing on online.

What are you missing?

Do you have a voice?

2. Fix your website! Website is the

cornerstone of your social media strategy

Social media will bring visitors back to your website

3. Get bloggin’ Anybody can be a content publisher – not just the

media companies Establish yourself as an ‘authority’; build

credibility Write interesting, provocative posts to engage

with readers Write short articles; write regularly – maybe twice

a week

Start at http://www.wordpress.com for free Transition to a domain hosted blog later – ie.

http://www.yourdomain.com/blog

4. Facebook it up for your biz Over 750 million active users!

Has overtaken Google in US as most viewed website

‘Facebook Pages’ are for businesses (not standard profiles or Groups)

Set it up in seconds at www.facebook.com/pages

Extending your Facebook presence Claim your vanity URL at

www.facebook.com/username once you have 25 fans

Add custom tabs with your own content

Use apps to extend the functionality of the page – try North Social for sweepstakes, fan offer apps

Display a splash page for non-fans that asks them to become fans

5. Start Tweet, Tweet, Tweetin’ Micro-blogging; 140 character limit – basically

‘SMS on the web’ (but best done via a mobile device)

You follow people, they follow you; your ‘tweets’ are seen by your followers, you see the ‘tweets’ of people you follow

Many people write off Twitter: who would be interested in this seemingly banal, nebulous information?

What are those weird characters, man?

Hash tag # - designates a topic (eg. #abaconf11)

@ symbol – designates a Twitter user (eg. @boomerangbooks

Allows Twitter users to search for tags and to isolate tweets that contain that tag

6. Automate & centralise posting Posts on a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc

can be ‘ported’ between one another using a variety of tools, removing the requirement to post manually on multiple sites.

Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com) sends blog posts to Facebook and Twitter

Desktop tools (and mobile phone apps) like Tweetdeck and Seesmic can be used as a central hub for posting to multiple social networks at once

7. Integrate & enable sharing To grow your social media community, make it

easy to connect/follow by integrating social media elements into your pages and enabling sharing options Social bookmarking buttons FB Like buttons Google+1 buttons FB Boxes Twitter widgets

To implement, it’s normally just a small piece of code that is added to your page HTML – ask your geek!

8. Publish book event video online Video is the biggest growth area on the web as

bandwidth and online storage increases Over 24 hours of video every minute is uploaded to

YouTube YouTube is now the world’s second largest search

engine Video can be done cheaply with a handheld

camcorder

Copy the file to your computer and then upload to YouTube within minutes

Embed the video in your website or blog using the special code…

9. Start an internal wiki to store stuff Hawaiian term for ‘quick’ A website created by a group of people who

have the ability to contribute and modify content

Often used to create collaborative and community sites – best known site is Wikipedia

Great for internal collaboration – think intranets, knowledge management, document sharing

10. Manage your rep & pry on competitors Social media means that everybody’s talkin’ – and

they might be talkin’ about you Who has Googled themselves? People are commenting about your organisation

on the web! Where appropriate, you should respond;

sometimes best to ignore Use Google Alerts – www.google.com/alerts Use Twitter Search - http://search.twitter.com/

That’s it… Questions?