David Schirmer did a Youtube vid about growing your followship on Twitter, and “popping the champagne cork” when you reach 1000 followers, but I wanted to ask him, what do you think that means? While I appreciated his helpfulness, I wanted to ask if he enjoys having 1000 strangers tweeting at you? Does he interact with many of them? Follow their links? Respond? (How can he possibly, unless he spends all day online?) Or does David Schirmer simply find joy in imagining that number of followers = sales of some product = wealth? OTOH, has that milestone resulted in added sales?
My concern is that in this, as in so many other platforming activities, we confuse action with results. I am busy, therefore I am successful. As a writer, I have to really pay attention to this, or else I’ll end the day thinking I wrote a lot, when in fact all I did was platform and network. Yes, that IS a part of my business, and it’s frankly addictive, but it ain’t the same thing as getting my character back home to California, and to resolve her life-challenging dilemma.
Back to the original question to my readers: Are you seeing an increase in actual sales due to your growing Twitter followship?
I have booked speaking engagements following Twitter conversations and I know people using Twitter who attribute sales directly to that product.
I recently engaged in another blog on the same topic:
http://www.powersiteblog.com/2009/12/17/im-coming-out-of-the-closet-the-truth-about-twitter?awesm=fbshare.me_AK6hp
I love to use Twitter as a research tool.
Can you increase sales?
Certainly. You need to learn how to use appropriate filters and target your perfect client. That includes authors. It’s not about SELLING per se. It’s more about gaining credibility and trust.
Great post. I’ve often wondered the same thing myself. I have seen some blogs really take off and turn into books (Cake Wrecks for one) but what about Twitter? It would be interesting to find out if anyone has seen success there. I am sure different approaches yield different results.
Hi Lynne, good point!
I think of “platform” and “networking” as two different entities. You can “network” yourself to death and not gain one single person for a “platform.” When you approach a publisher or agent, they want to know your “platform” and can’t give a hoot about your networking, i.e, how many people are READY to buy your book the minute it hits the streets. Then, of course, they want you to network to try to sell more.
Your platform, when you approach needs to scream: “I have 5000 people holding their breath until my book is released for them to devour.” My feeling is that you can tweet, twit, YouTube, link-in, and all the other myriad of networking sights, but it’s those same people you tweet who are doing the same things for their products, and no one gets anywhere.
Now, I’m talking about authors, here. If you have a product to sell that will make people beautiful, skinnier, younger, taller, hairier, brighter, sexier, then you might make a sale. But authors have a harder time I think, pushing their books.
So if you can come up with a “tip” for networking that adds people to your platform, I’d love for you to pass it on to the rest of us.