When writers publish their books with Outskirts Press at the Diamond or Pearl level, we spend the next two years sharing marketing and promotional suggestions with them via email. The act of “publishing a book” doesn’t end when you are holding the copy in your hand. Marketing that book is just as important.
Over the last several months, our company has made a big push into social networking, and we’re working hard to bring out authors along for the ride. We’ve added Facebook “like” buttons to all our products and services; we have added the same buttons to all our published books in our bookstore and to our author webpages, and we’ve added Facebook plug-ins within the Publishing Center so authors can keep up-to-date on our Facebook community from within Outskirts Press.
Why are we taking all these steps? Because Facebook is an important marketing tool for a published author. One of our recently published authors, Kirk Byron Jones, Ph.D., recently wrote a guest article for our Outskirts Press blog titled 7 Ways to Build Your Facebook Community: Imagine Your Book Before Thousands of Faces. In the article, he discusses his Facebook community and its 12,000 (!) supporters. That’s quite a platform.
In fact, by any measure, Facebook is quite a platform. Just listen to some of these statistics, according to Facebook themselves:
- More than 500 million active users are registered
- 50% of the active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- The average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- There are over 900 million objects that people interact with, including profiles, groups, events and community pages
- The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- The average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- More than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month, including web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.
- Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with the Facebook Platform
- People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
- Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook from external websites
- An average of 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook every day
- So far, more than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
- More than 70 are translations available on the site
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
- Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
- There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
- There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
President of Outskirts Press 