Tod Shuttleworth

Tommy Nelson Social Media Efforts

by Tod on 17/05/10 at 9:40 am

This post is part of a continuing series on how we are using social media at Thomas Nelson. We have looked at Max Lucado’s Community, BookSneeze and Amish Fiction. This post looks at what we are doing with Tommy Nelson, our Children’s products.

Tommy Nelson’s site is a place for parents who are looking for guidance and materials to help them raise their children with Christian values. Parents can hear from experts and authors, share ideas with other parents and get resources for their kids.

The Tommy marketing team built the site with help of Jon Dale. Abby Barnhart manages the site. It launched in January 2010.  Thanks to the use of twitter(@tommynelson, +1600 followers), Facebook and an active blog, the site is already getting around 3500  visitors each month, including one month with almost 7,000 visitors. Not bad for a site that’s not even four months old.

About 40% of Tommy Nelson’s traffic comes from other sites’ referrals, probably Facebook being an important source. 44% of the traffic is from direct traffic, which is likely due at least partially to the interest garnered from Twitter.

Blogs are updated multiple times each week by authors, moms, experts and the Tommy Nelson team. One regular blog theme is a series that helps parents answer the tough questions kids have about faith. The Tommy team is hoping to maybe dovetail these efforts into a community.

If you have kids, check out the free goodies on Tommy Nelson’s site.

Tommy Nelson also has an iPhone app.

The app has videos from our children’s DVDs.

The app has videos and other information about our our book products.

The app can even direct you to where to buy our products.

The app also provides the latest feeds from Tommy’s twitter and Facebook posts.

The real value of these social media efforts is the direct relationship we are building with our end-consumers. For years, we made the products, but then relied on retailers to get to our products to the customer. We can now talk directly to 3500 people that are passionate about our product and our mission. That’s big for us, and has all sorts of implications from product development to direct sales opportunities.

Tommy Nelson is making good progress quickly to build it’s brand. Check out the app and web site and let me know what you think.