Social Networking Sites – Page 3 – President of Outskirts Press

ceo, marketing, Social Networking Sites, start-up

Social media polls – looking ahead

Over the last couple of weeks we have held two different Web 2.0 polls on our Outskirts Press blog. The first poll determined that our clients wanted us to add a Social Media Market Research option to our growing selection of publication services. This option helps authors make the best, market-based decisions regarding their covers, titles, beginnings, endings, or marketing tactics, for example.

The second poll determined that our new and potential clients wanted us to offer a $300 “Mad Money” publishing promotion in October, which rewards new publishing packages with a $300 “line of credit” to use toward any pre-production service/option the author desires, including editing, professional custom cover design, Kindle edition, iPad edition, ghostwriting, or what have you.

But in both polls, the margin of victory between Choice #1 and the runner-up was fairly close. In the poll determining the next option we should launch, Market Research won by only 10%. It earned 50% of the votes while the Featured Book-of-the-Week option earned 40% (author apps earned the remaining 10%). And in the poll asking what promotion we should offer in October, Mad Money won by a margin of just over 1%. The instant 10% discount barely came in #2.

So while these polls helped us prioritize, the results certainly don’t prohibit the other options and other promotions from being offered. In fact, the Featured Book of the Week option’s showing with 40% demonstrated to us that it’s a highly-valued option also, so we are already working on it and will most likely have it available for our authors in October. We’ve always known the instant 10% discount to be a valuable promotion, so we will more than likely offer that promotion before the end of the year as well.

The poor showing of the Author Apps option did surprise me, frankly. But, to be honest, it was also kind of a relief. I was involved significantly in its pre-development here at Outskirts Press and now I feel confident re-prioritizing some of my other responsibilities and putting the Author Apps a little lower on the launch list, which will probably push it out to 2012 sometime. I’m loving these author polls. They help us give our authors exactly what they want when they want them. When you have so many things you WANT to do but a limited pool of resources with which to do them, this sort of insight directly from your clients is invaluable.

So if you’re a business owner, manager, entrepreneur, author, or other professional, I encourage you to start using polls on your blog or website, too. They’re easy content, fun for your visitors, and provide you with actual useful feedback that validates your customers and helps your business.

Social Networking Sites

Advertising on Facebook with the Photoviewer – Part 3

Once you realize that the thumbnail image shown along the top photo strip row of the Facebook fan page is not identical to the larger image viewed when clicking on the thumbnail, a world of potential marketing and promotional opportunities presents itself. The trick is to make the photo strip image look pleasing AND to make the resulting larger image effective at whatever your goal is. In our case, we wanted the larger image to brand our company, Outskirts Press, and we wanted to offer some information about each package, along with a URL for purchase.

To accomplish all these goals, you have to know the image dimensions for the optimal large image and the dimensions for the interior space pre-determined by Facebook as the thumbnail portion. This is a little tricky because the larger image is optimal when it is square and the thumbnail image is optimal when it is rectangular. Complicating matters further is the fact that Facebook doesn’t take the precise CENTER of the larger image to generate the thumbnail image; it skews high.

Your full image should be 720 pixels wide by 720 pixels high at 72 dpi. The image for your thumbnail should fall into a space that is 535 pixels wide by 375 pixels high at 72 dpi. This “thumbnail” graphic should not be centered, but rather off-set 90 pixels from the top and 93 pixels from either edge. This leaves you with 255 pixels below the thumbnail image for marketing/promotional purposes — content that will ONLY be seen in the larger view. Use the bottom 190 pixels for optimal visuals, although you should also leave a blank strip approximatley 25 pixels high along the very bottom because this is where Facebook is going to add its “Like/Comment/Tag Photo” overlay boxes, and you don’t want that stuff interfering with your image.

Was that too confusing? Perhaps a graphic will help. If you follow the directions above, you’re left with a template that looks roughly like this:

Tomorrow we’ll see what our new “Diamond” package graphic looks like once we follow this template…

branding, Social Networking Sites

How to market on Facebook with the Photo strip – Part 2

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that the Facebook photo strip along the top of business fan pages offers a good branding opportunity and can also be used to effectively market or promote a product or service. Up until recently, we at Outskirts Press were only using the photo strips for the first part of that equation — branding. And we were losing the opportunity to market or promote when someone clicked on the image for a closer look.

Realizing the potential for what can be done with these images required first realizing that Facebook doesn’t “thumbnail” images in the traditional way. Typically, when an image is “thumbnailed” (meaning, made smaller), the thumbnail image is an exact duplicate of the “larger” image, just at a reduced size. But Facebook does something different, as seen by their use of the Profile Picture along the left-hand column, which also contains the square “avatar” picture. In other words, the Thumbnail for the Profile picture is NOT an exact duplicate of the image, but rather a pre-defined section of the larger image.

The Photo strip images work the same way. The thumbnail images shown along the top of the fan page are pre-determined sections of the larger version of the image that is viewed when the thumbnail is clicked. In fact, when an image is created correctly, the same image can be both a successful, “clean” thumbnail image AND a more promotional image.

For instance, with our 5 package graphics, I wanted to maintain the look and feel of the 5 gemstones in a row (shown below)…

… and at the same time, I wanted the user to see a more branded graphic for each package when viewing the larger image. I even wanted to include a “call to action.” All it took was determining the optimal image specs for both the “large” version of the graphic and the “thumbnail” portion of the same graphic.

And I’ll reveal what those settings are tomorrow…

blogging, publicity, self publishing a book, Social Networking Sites

Get featured on our publishing app with a Virtual Book Tour

All last week and this week we’ve been discussing marketing methods to get featured in the “Blog” category of the Outskirts Press app. We have established that the best way is to focus on being featured in one of these blog categories from our Outskirts Press blog:

Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants

So far we have already discussed Author and Book Spotlights, along with bestsellers. That leads us to Virtual Book Tours, and one of the guaranteed ways to get featured on our app.

A virtual book tour is similar to an actual book tour, although instead of physically traveling from bookstore to bookstore, or radio show to radio show, you and/or your book are making “appearances” in the blogosphere and on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This saves time and money because it is much more efficient and cost-effective to “appear” on a blog, a website, or an internet radio talk show, than it is to load up the mini-van and drive from state to state. And, unlike a physical tour, which is over the minute you leave, a virtual book tour stays archived and available for Internet
searches forever.

In addition to all the other blog “appearances”, reviews, and author interviews that can result from a Virtual Book Tour, we also make sure to get each of our author’s virtual tours off to a great start by giving them a “tour stop” at one or more of our social community channels, whether it be a link from our Twitter account, a video uploaded to our YouTube Channel, or an interview on our blog.

Author interviews that appear on our blog as a result of their participating in a Virtual Book Tour through Outskirts Press also appear on our iPhone app. All our Virtual Book Tours also include a short video, which we upload to our YouTube channel for our authors. Since our YouTube Channel is also featured on our app, ordering a Virtual Book Tour usually means the author and book can be featured in two different areas of the app – in the “Blog” category and in the “Videos” category.

Our Virtual Book Tours are so popular, we help authors from other publishers facilitate virtual book tours, too, although those authors aren’t mentioned on our blog or in our app (let’s leave that up to THEIR publishers, shall we?) Oh, wait — their publishers don’t have an app, but those other publishers will take up to 50-80% of their authors’ royalties. No wonder their authors aren’t too motivated to market their books.

Anyhoo, to schedule your own Virtual Book Tour, regardless of whether you are an Outskirts Press author or not, click here.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook statistics

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

Social Networking Sites

Facebook Images

Continuing our discussion of branding various social networking and video sharing sites, I’d like to return to Facebook for a moment and touch upon a topic I briefly mentioned a few posts ago when I was discussing the new Facebook Page design and its new “branding graphic” specifications along the left-hand side:

In addition to the graphic along the left, I mentioned that the five image slots along the top also provide a branding opportunity if you manage the photographs correctly. This section of a Facebook page randomly presents the 5 most recent images uploaded into the main folder. In the case of Outskirts Press, this is ideal because we have five different publishing packages that are represented by five different gemstones. They add a splash of color and “interest” to what might otherwise be a normal, standard Facebook page.

The downside to this is that you have to prevent other users from uploading images. Another downside is that when you, as the page administrator, upload an image, it may disturb the “branding” efforts you have put forth. This is what happened with Outskirts Press on St. Patrick’s day when we offered a one-day “Search for the pot o’ gold” Internet search opportunity for a Facebook community, the prize being a book teaser video worth $99. We uploaded the image of the pot of gold that was within one of our YouTube Videos, and of course, as a result, that image also appeared as one of our top five images:

But that’s okay. If anything, the temporary “difference” to the Image Section brought even more attention to the one-day only St. Patrick’s Day event.

Interestingly, no one “won.” I don’t know if it was because the search was “too hard” or “too boring” but that’s always one of the fun things about running social networking events — you never know what is going to happen…

self publishing, self publishing a book, Social Networking Sites

Amazon Author Central Benefits

Today I’m going to share a real-world example of one of the benefits of Amazon Author Central. I experienced this personally because of my involvement with Fandemonium, the Facebook Anthology social publishing experience that Outskirts Press and its Facebook Community members joined together in producing over the past two months.

Author Central allowed me to “improve” the appearance of Fandemonium’s listing on Amazon. Here’s how:

When Fandemonium was originally distributed via Ingram, the “meta data” information for the book’s synopsis information looked like this on Amazon:

It’s all one big block of text, and not very visually inviting. I’ll admit this was my fault, since I uploaded the meta data personally for this book instead of having one of our professional project managers do it for me, in which case, it would have looked correct initially. They publish over 100 books a month so they’re used to the tricky nuances of formatting meta data so it looks great on Amazon. Another example of “leaving it to the experts.”

But, never fear. Amazon Author Central let me easily improve the formatting myself. I simply logged into my Author Central account and edited my book’s record. The changes took a couple of days to update, and then, just like that, the new listing looked like this:

This is just one reason to have an Amazon Author Central account. I’ve discussed other reasons in the past and will continue on that topic in the near future.

In the meantime, congratulations to all our Facebook Community members who have work appearing in Fandemonium. With every copy sold, Outskirts Press is donating $7.38 to the American Red Cross on behalf of its Facebook fans, so buy your copy today by clicking here. Currently, American Red Cross efforts are assisting in the aftermath of the Japan earthquake and Pacific tsunami, so in addition to taking part in a social publishing experience, it’s for a good cause.