The Levy Library Blog

Twitter – An Underused Tool for Book Marketing?

By Robin O’Hanlon, MIS and Dr. Gali Halevi, MLS, PhD

With over 320 million active monthly users and magnitude of 350K tweets per minute[i], Twitter is  a powerful marketing tool used by 65.8% of US companies[ii]. Yet, it would appear that  book publishers, at least in the academic arena, are not leveraging Twitter as a marketing tool.

Image credit: http://alanrinzler.com/2011/03/strategic-tweeting-for-authors/

In order to determine the extent to which academic and scientific books are mentioned in Twitter, we examined Ebrary, a multidisciplinary eBooks database from ProQuest. We uploaded 71,443 eBooks ISBNs numbers from the Levy Library’s Ebrary collection in April 2016 to PLUMx Metrics Dashboard, an altmetics platform . PLUMx Metrics dashboard tracks metrics from over 30 sources, including Twitter and is able to track over 20 different types of outputs, from articles and books to videos by using unique identifiers such as web links, DOI or ISBN.

For this analysis, we chose books that have at least 10 Twitter mentions. Out of the 71,443 books measured, only 39 academic or scientific books have 10 or more Twitter mentions. As can be seen from figure 1, history books received the most Twitter mentions in the past 10 years, followed by semantics and economics.

In most cases Twitter mentions last at least 2 year after publication,  meaning that conversations around their content last for a significant amount of time (see figure 2). Considering that academic and scientific books issue new editions quite often, Twitter can be used to instill interest in current editions until new ones are published.

As books remain an important source of academic and scientific information, their use can be enhanced by using Twitter as a marketing tool. Creating conversation around mentions, their content can be discussed through Twitter by the academic community.  There are several studies that show how scientists use Twitter[iii-v] including mentioning publications, conference presentations, and engaging in scientific discussions. There is no reason books should not be included as a topic for academic discussion on Twitter. Indeed, publishers and authors of scientific books should work to drive Twitter interactions and discussions on books, which can in turn lead to enhanced research impact and visibility.

References

[i] https://www.brandwatch.com/2016/05/44-twitter-stats-2016/

[ii] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Facebook-Twitter-Remain-Top-Social-Networks-Used-by-US-Companies/1013290

[iii] https://www.brandwatch.com/2016/05/44-twitter-stats-2016/

[iv] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Facebook-Twitter-Remain-Top-Social-Networks-Used-by-US-Companies/1013290

[v] http://blogs.plos.org/thestudentblog/2016/08/09/social-media-for-ecrs-serious-scientists-can-and-do-use-twitter/