WARWICK’S BOOKS
Warwick’s books is an independent bookseller in San Diego, they have around 5,000 followers on Instagram. They seem to post sporadically. The hashtags they posted seemed to be in line with the types you find on bookseller accounts. They would post hashtags like: YAboooks, newfiction, sandiego, and booksellerrecomends.
Some weeks they post multiple times a day, and sometimes six days go by without the account posting anything. A lot of the content seemed sort of dry. The posts were often images of books, with a quick synopsis and whether they would recommend it. As someone who is really into literature, this sort of stuff interests me, but I’m not sure it would necessarily get engagement from someone who was not already a fan of the store. The amount of likes they got were anywhere from the 50’s to the 300’s, often falling somewhere between 100 and 200. They did not receive many comments.
I think this account is a lesson in what not to do. Although they posted hashtags about books, the content they posted was often not the type of content made to get a lot of likes. Like I said before, this is a good account if you already like the store, but as far as building an audience, it needs better content.
VERBATIME BOOKS
Verbatim books is perhaps most comparable to Warwick’s. Like Warwick’s they are an independent bookstore in San Diego, but unlike Warwick’s they seem to be more effective at gaining followers on social media. The number of hashtags they give a post seem to differ depending on the post. On memes they often will have no hashtags at all, but if they post a picture of a book there will be all sorts of hashtags. There are exceptions to this rule. One of the memes they posted is about Dune, which just released in theaters and below they posted all sorts of hashtags. Some of the hashtags were, “Dune,” “Dunememes” and “Sci-fi.” I assume they put hashtags on the meme since lots of people were posting about the movie already.
Verbatim books on Instagram have about 16.4k followers. They post very often on average around twice a day. Their last post was today. They seem to get in the mid 100s a lot, so about 500-700 likes on at least one of their posts per day seems like a certainty a lot of the time. So, around 1/32 followers are liking their posts daily. They seem to frequently get over 1,000 likes frequently as well. The most comments I saw on a post of their page was 28.
I think something to be learned from their account is to have fun and attach yourself to trending topics whenever you can. They didn’t send out hashtags on whatever was trending all the time, but when something was relevant to their business, like Dune, they did post about it and went sort of crazy with the hashtags.
BARNES & NOBLE
Barnes & Noble, with 704k followers, had the most followers out of any account that I looked at. If you gaged how successful an account was by followers, I would say this account was successful, but if you’re gaging a social media account by how many likes they get per post, I would say this account underperforms. Most of their posts had likes in the 1,000 to 2,000 range. I think a lot of this is due to the nature of the posts. A lot of the posts seemed to be what you would expect from a big bookseller. They often did post a lot of hashtags (sometimes these even took up four lines). I have no idea if any of these hashtags were trending, but I’m sort of doubtful. Many of them were generic like, “mystery.” The most engaged post in terms of likes and responses was a quote by Winnie the Pooh with around 12k likes and 83 responses. I think it was because it wasn’t explicitly selling a product, but just posting a quote that people nostalgically remember. There was a much more communal response around that post. There weren’t that many hashtags on the post either. Even though I don’t think this account is great at getting likes, I do think it is good at informing potential customers. I left the account knowing more about what new books were out than when I hadn’t looked at the account.
AMAZON BOOKS
I was surprised at the number of followers on this account. It only had 67.8k followers, even though Amazon is one of the biggest booksellers in the world. It did not post that much. It often only posted 2-3 times per week. They hardly used any hashtags either. They kept using the same one, “bookstagram’ over and over. Sometimes they would hashtag other things like “giveaway,” but that was rare. The amount of likes they got for the followers they had wasn’t particularly impressive. They tended to get around 100 to 200 likes per post. The most liked posts on their account were quotes, pictures of celebrities, and “best of” lists. The posts with the most comments tended to be ones that asked questions.
LESSONS LEARNED:
1. Whenever possible, hashtag your posts with what is trending.
2. Hashtags will lead people to see your posts, but unless you have engaging content people will not like your posts.
3. Use lots of hashtags and vary them as well.
4. Inform your audience about what you are selling in between the type of posts trying to get lots of engagement.
POTENTIAL HASHTAGS:
Scifi, books, topten, StephenKing, shoplocal, SanDiego, indiebookstore, tbt, classics, mustread, bookstagram, mystery, booksoftheyear, bookseller, nationalbookawards, autumnreads, JamesPatterson,
No comments:
Post a Comment