First let me state that I have no shares in Facebook or personal interest in promoting Mark Zuckerberg. But I thought I’d share the new Mashable/Statista/Shareaholic data on traffic from social networks to publishers. After all, it looks like everyone else is sharing – on Facebook most of all.
“Facebook Drives the Most Traffic to Publishers, Beating Twitter and Reddit,” reads the Mashable headline. And before you get too excited, the publishers they have in mind are online content publishers managing websites, not the book publisher kind. That said, the information is valuable to anyone using social networks to promote their work – which includes not only real book publishers, but also especially self-publishers.
The Statista/Shareaholic chart, which is apparently “based on data from 250,000 publishers reaching 250 million monthly unique visitors,” makes it clear that Facebook is now the Number One traffic driver for web surfers linking to websites, accounting for over 10 percent of clickthroughs in September 2013 – up from just 6.5 percent only a year ago. Surprisingly, Pinterest is in second place, accounting for 3.7 percent of traffic in September. Twitter ranks third at 1.2 percent.
So tweets don’t beat Facebook posts, it seems. Or even Pinterest posts. So if you’re a self-publisher or small publisher looking to maximize your social media marketing, you can achieve nearly ten times the impact by concentrating on Facebook rather than Twitter. Not bad information for the hungry and hustling self-published author.
I try to use a dedicated books page and a regular (personal) page, as I have for a few years now. Unfortunately, if you’re not already a well-known author, people won’t find you (or even search for you), so for most of us, it’s like talking at an empty room. Shares are critical, and even Facebook followers are getting tired of what amounts to book ads peppering FB pages.
I agree that shares play a critical role in ensuring you get exposure on Facebook. Even with the option to advertise, people tend to pay more attention to shares. It’s just a matter of producing Facebook content that is worthy to be shared.
I first came across the idea of promoting ebooks through social media from this article: http://www.spi-global.com/blog/innovation-lab/properly-market-self-published-ebook/. It’s really interesting how social media has taken the world by storm, making it really crucial for writers to create an online marketing scheme prior their ebook launch.