Publishers tend to post more pictures of books (their products) instead of human faces, but that might not be such a bad thing.
Posting pictures with faces in them, is a trick used by fashion, sporting good and other companies to get likes on Instagram. In fact, pictures with human faces are 38% more likely to receive likes than photos with no faces according to researchers at The Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs. However, though valuable as a general trend, this isn’t necessarily true for all industries.
To see what book companies specifically should do, I took some of the top publishers in the United States (according to the University of Illinois) and browsed their last fifty posts on Instagram. As a result, Penguin Books, Harper Collins, and Simon and Schuster. Helped me to discover some valuable results.
- Not a single post on Penguin Books or Simon and Schuster had a human face in it!
- The 805 average number of likes for Harper Collins pictures including faces was down 31.62% from their average total engagement of 1177.2 likes per post.
- Simon and Schuster had 86% of their posts feature a book and yet had about a quarter as many likes as Penguin Books. Penguin Succeeds because they focus on the product (with 66% of photos having books) and diversify with the remaining 34% composed of other elements such as food, places to read, shelves and accessories.
Unique communities such as books on instagram, require niche-specific strategies. It may seem reasonable that providing faces of an author or reading child every once in a while would increase engagement. However, HarperCollins proved this empirically untrue. The fact is, two of the biggest publishing companies don’t bother to use these types of posts. This suggests that faces may not drive engagement as effectively in the world of book publishing.
So what can a publisher do? Both Penguin Books, and Simon and Schuster seem to have the majority of their photos focused on the product itself—books! Crazy right? There isn’t really a go to replacement for face posts—variety is more important. A better marketing strategy is to focus on the product.
If you can find a way to be creative while maintaining ultimate focus on the product—you will have higher engagement levels.