Our Facebook page now has over 7,000 fans!

Chris OConnor · Mon Nov 07, 2011 10:24 pm

With some recent creative marketing the BookTalk.org Facebook page has grown from 6,000 fans to over 7,000. I'd love to see it over 10,000 and I'm setting 10k as the goal by the end of 2012. Have you joined?

kelstan · Mon Nov 07, 2011 10:54 pm

Congrats for building an impressive fan base Chris!

Chris OConnor · Tue Nov 08, 2011 2:21 am

Thank you! :-)

Dexter · Tue Nov 08, 2011 6:07 am

Where are all these people? Do they even know there's a forum?

Chris OConnor · Sun Nov 13, 2011 11:34 am

I have been utterly amazed that the people using our Facebook page show little to no interest in joining the forums. The fact is Facebook attracts people primarily interested in extremely shallow discussions. A discussion on FB almost always entails 1 post by each person of no more than incomplete sentence. I'm still brainstorming for how to tap into this growing membership and figure out how to pull them here.

Dexter, are you a member of our Facebook page? Please join and check it out. If you have ideas I am all ears.

Dexter · Sun Nov 13, 2011 11:55 am

I try to keep my Facebook usage to a bare minimum, mainly just a way for some people to get a hold of me.

It looks like you're doing what you can to publicize the forums, but you're right, a lot of them probably have no interest in getting involved in an in-depth discussion. I suspect many just saw "booktalk" in the title and thought it was a good thing to "like" on their page.

Chris OConnor · Sun Nov 13, 2011 12:09 pm

Exactly. By having BT on their "like" list they get the benefit of appearing to be "into books."

Chris OConnor · Thu Nov 17, 2011 11:06 am

We now have over 8,300 fans on our Facebook page yet hardly any of them will ever venture over to our forums. Facebook attracts people that enjoy extremely "brief" and "uncomplicated" interactions. I'm trying to be delicate in how I word this.

heledd · Sun Dec 04, 2011 6:47 am

Chris I'm wondering about the people who never post too. I think a lot are nervous in case their ideas are ridiculed. But also, do you think it would be a good idea to have a few hints and tips about what to look for in particular books? I think a lot of people like or dislike books, but can't really explain why. Or would most view that as condescending?

Chris OConnor · Sun Dec 04, 2011 9:35 pm

To be honest I don't expect much out of the Facebook crowd. Facebook is designed for shallow and superficial communication. One person says something and then awaits some replies. But if no replies come within a short period of time the original statement is buried deep on everyone's wall. The opportunity to have quality ongoing discussions is simply not present on FB.

But there is plenty of reason to think we can improve around here. I'm going to create a thread soon explaining some of the upcoming changes that should help our growth considerably. Yes, we appear to be quite academic. Look at our logo. All you see are non-fiction books. There is no reason to think we cater to fiction book lovers. And last night I researched some keywords and I learned that the word "fiction is searched literally 10x as much per month as "non-fiction." While I prefer non-fiction we are shooting ourselves in the foot by making BookTalk.org appear to be an exclusively non-fiction community. A new logo will be designed soon that is more welcoming to book lovers of both fiction and non-fiction, all genres, all ages, etc...

If you look on our Home page at www.BookTalk.org you see absolutely no reason to believe we have forums for discussing religion, politics, art, entertainment, science and just general topics. This is going to change soon. Our entire site, other than the forums, will be upgraded soon to a Wordpress theme. It will be clean, orderly, simply, welcoming and way less confusing. Right now people arrived on our Home page and get slammed with a zillion ads, blocks, and confusing links. All this will change. We're started working on the upgrade last week.

heledd, what do you mean by, "But also, do you think it would be a good idea to have a few hints and tips about what to look for in particular books?"

Sal_McCoy · Mon Dec 05, 2011 2:49 am

Just looked at the page and there's quite a bit of activity. Not much discussion or analysis of what they're reading, just listing titles and the usual "I liked this, didn't like that" though.

The changes sound exciting and if we can get even a small fraction of the "likes" from FB to regulary discuss here it would be awesome.

I think alot of people struggle articulating their thoughts on books because they don't know the vernacular. I say I'm reading a social satire and people think it's a comedy. I ask someone about a book they're reading and they only ever say whether the plot is good or bad, with no explanation why.

On the other hand, it could be due to the fact that books are small talk for most people, like the weather or what they've been doing lately. People may not expect an interest in a proper discussion, so just give a superficial answer.

The best we can do is provide examples of analysis through our posts, which will give newer people a vocabulary to work with.

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