Yes, But Can It Help Me Sell My Book?

Twitter is – you may have heard – huge. Little sentences and giant implications for the way we communicate with others. For us in the media it syndicating content and finding an audience.

But can it move nerdy tomes off the shelves? If Alyssa Milano tells her followers to buy your book – will they “follow” her command?

Maybe not, Megan Garber at NiemanLab.org says.

And that has big implications not only for news organizations, but also for the platforms that are hoping to translate their ubiquity into financial and social gain. If you want your work to have impact, then targeting a bundle of closely connected networks — with news, with links, with messages — may make more sense than going for numbers alone. Spreading a conversation is not the same as affecting it. “I’m not saying that Twitter is useless,” Christakis said, “but I think that the ability of Twitter to disseminate information is different than its ability to influence behavior.”

Read the whole piece here.