Psychology Press has 10,000+ Twitter followers
The Psychology Press Twitter account – https://twitter.com/Routledgepsych - was set up two years ago and was quickly integrated into Psychology Press’ websites, email marketing campaigns and our traditional print-on-paper catalogues.
Responsibility for posting tweets is shared between 7 members of staff from both the books and journals teams, located in both our Brighton & Hove (UK) and New York (US) offices, allowing them to respond quickly to any tweets directed at Psychology Press throughout the UK and US working day.
The Psychology Press Twitter feed is the most popular academic psychology publisher’s Twitter feed in the world, and this dominant social media marketing position allows Psychology Press to maintain a high level of visibility for their books and journals.
Paul Watson, Psychology Press’ Web & Emarketing Manager credits the success of the Twitter feed to a number of factors:
“Firstly we’re lucky to have such highly-engaged, experienced members of staff as our ‘tweeters’ who have a deep understanding of the academic psychology market – when they tweet they’re effectively talking on a public stage to 10,000 psychology experts, and that needs specialist market knowledge.
Twitter isn’t a very formal place, so we use a polite but informal tone – Twitter has a ‘smart-casual’ dress code – and that’s been very successful. Trusting your tweeters is also important – Twitter seems to react well to spontaneity and a personal voice.
We tweet regularly and often, and we also tend to avoid direct-selling (which is considered a bit rude on Twitter) and instead focus on brand-building and indirect sales techniques – such as tweeting links to free journal articles on T&F Online (which increases institutional ‘usage stats’ for our journals, a major factor that universities use to decide whether to re-subscribe to journals each year) or to ‘teasers’ of new content such as free sample chapters from new books, or simply to psychology news that’s not directly related to our products.
It’s important to note that a high follower count isn’t the purpose of a social media account, but instead it should be viewed as one metric indicating that you are doing something right to attract potential customers and keep them engaged.
We’ve seen our tweets retweeted by influential academic psychology societies, in many cases to thousands of customers we might not otherwise have reached, with the added bonus of the perceived ‘approval’ of those same influential academic psychology societies.”
Psychology Press’ team of regular twitterers are: Rob Keery (Journals Marketing Manager, UK), Claire Fewson (Books Marketing Manager, UK), Kevin Williams (Books Marketing Manager, US), Michelle Barrie (Books Marketing Coordinator, US), Sarah Scoffield (Journals Publishing Editor, UK), Laura Ellis (Books Senior Editorial Assistant, UK), and Gina Campbell (Books Marketing Assistant, UK).