Everyone who writes or publishes wants to know how to use Twitter as a promotional tool to drive sales, and to that end the British book reading website Lovereading–sort of the ugly UK cousin to Goodreads, only with a smaller membership and more directly tied to big publishing houses–just completed a survey of members to ask them about Twitter. The results weren’t favorable to Twitter as an effective recommendation source or promotional tool, with The Bookseller going so far as to write, “The book-buying public may be largely immune to suggestions from Twitter, Facebook and other sites.”

Uh oh.

But wait! Before you dismiss Twitter as an also-ran in marketing, check out who Lovereading surveyed compared to who uses Twitter the most. As with all online communities, the only way to successfully connect is to figure out what kind of person participates in Twitter, and how he uses the service.

 

Who uses Twitter?

A study of Twitter users published last October by the Pew Internet Project looked at the periods between Nov-Dec 2008 and Aug-Sep 2009, and the big trend was that Twitter is skewing towards both the young and the highly-connected (in a wireless sense, not in a get-me-a-job-in-DC sense).

As recently as last April, Twitter was still considered to be leaning towards an older user group. That’s changed. Based on the Pew Internet study, the median age of a Twitter user is now 31. (By comparison, MySpace is 26, Facebook is 33, and LinkedIn is 39.) Around a third of Internet users between 18 and 34 use Twitter, while only about a tenth of those over 45 use Twitter.

Additionally, the more connected a person is, meaning the more types of devices he has that have wireless connectivity (e.g. a Kindle, a Nintendo DS Lite, a laptop), the more likely he is to use Twitter.

And finally (this comes from a different study), we can estimate that approximately 45% of Twitter users are men.

Now compare that info to the demographic breakdown of the Lovereading sample:

Clearly, the average Lovereading member and the average Twitter member don’t overlap much. If you want to reach the heavy book reader who is a member of Lovereading, yep, Twitter is probably a waste of time.

 

Okay, so how do Twitter users use Twitter?

But is Twitter useful for marketing to other groups? The Bookseller notes that there have been highly publicized sales spikes pegged to specific tweets on Twitter–Stephen Fry has a sort of “Oprah effect” on books he tweets about, for example. But this sort of organic celebrity-driven event is still an exception.

The thing about Twitter–and this is key to understanding how to use it–is that it’s primarily utilized as an ad-hoc news and gossip source. Even The Bookseller notes this in a quote from a publicist at Penguin:

“You find out about things first. I knew that thelondonpaper was closing before anyone else in the PR department, for instance, because I was looking at Twitter when it was announced. It seems to me the fastest news source out there.”

That’s a great example of how professional gossip spreads quickly via Twitter. Here’s a look at how news media content spreads:

Current events and news

Technology sites

Medical sites

Video game sites

Celebrity sites

How-To sites

There have indeed been interesting experiments with using Twitter in non-news ways, for example when the cast of the Broadway Musical “Next to Normal” presented an adapted version of the show on Twitter, posting updates in their characters’ voices. The Bookseller notes that Philippa Gregory and R. N. Morris tweeted serializations of their recent novels. It’s hard to directly measure the impact of Twitter on sales figures for these campaigns, however. More important, these sorts of broadcasting campaigns are antithetical to how Twitter is actually used, which means they’re being launched in what could at best be called an indifferent environment.

Finally, celebrities and tech-savvy authors already know that Twitter works well as a pseudo-direct line to your audience. You broadcast updates; your fans respond, although not with the expectation that you will answer them directly, and they also retweet your updates to their acquaintances. Like a Facebook fan page, Twitter can be used as a ready-made online presence for publicity purposes. But be careful: overtly self-promotional tweets drive away users, because what they want is new content from you, not ads for your existing work. Look at the tweets from Kathy Griffin and John Hodgeman, two book-peddling writers who mix personal gossip, jokes, and updates with alerts about their next book signing event.

 

Conclusion

There are a few other things to consider about how Twitter works, and its role in online communication at the start of 2010:

Twitter doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It pulls in URLs and images from elsewhere, and more important, Twitter status updates are often fed into Facebook walls or displayed on blogs. In general, social networking services are growing more integrated, not less, so a mention one place may turn into a mention many places.

Twitter is a cheap way to build a community with younger fans. When it comes to creating a community between an artist and his audience, Twitter falls somewhere between an email campaign and an online group chat (which, by the way are practically relics at this point). This makes it a good way to interact with your audience without sucking up lots of real-time resources. If you’re constitutionally unable to enjoy Twitter and tweeting–and you’ll find no judgmentalism from me on this matter–find someone who can do it on your behalf. But be wary of trying to deliberately mislead people; you don’t really control your reputation online once you’ve tarnished it.

Twitter may be more effective at creating awareness than at actually converting anyone into a customer. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything based solely on a tweet, but I certainly have found out about new songs, new books, and new TV shows because of Twitter. A real world example: I had never heard of the BBC series Gavin & Stacey before a Twitter friend mentioned it in an update about three weeks ago. But that good fortune relied on an old fashioned peer-to-peer recommendation, not on any sort of marketing campaign. If you can find a way to get users to spontaneously mention you in a tweet, you’re golden.

The demographic makeup of Twitter will continue to evolve, so don’t expect that what works/doesn’t work today will necessarily hold true in six months.

Twitter is mobile–it reaches people when they’re at work, in transit, or out shopping. This may not be the best time to encourage someone to go buy a book, but it might be a fine time to jog their memory that a book or author exists.

Don’t aim for viral hits, aim for seeding. This applies to everything online, not just Twitter. The more references to your product you can get out there, the more likely one of them will take root and produce a sale. And unlike ad campaigns, a lot of online “seeds” can stick around for years.

And finally, it doesn’t matter what social network service or status update service is popular right now; just shut up and use it. When the next service comes along, you’ll switch to that one. And so on.

(Bird images: Lip Kee and donjd2)