That cozy, helpful, unfailingly polite indie bookstore down the way? They're killing it on Twitter right now. ♦
really hoping this Wind blows my useless body straight into the sun— The Book Loft (@TheBookLoft1) February 13, 2019
According to an article from Axios published in January, independent bookstores have grown by nearly 50 percent across the country in the last 10 years, from 1,651 stores to 2,470. Bradley Graham, co-owner of the independent bookstore Politics & Prose in Washington D.C., is quoted in the piece attributing the rising success to “a sense of community, a sense of neighborhood-ness.”
Social media serves as a twofold strategy for establishing this sense of “neighborhood-ness” by informing the public and creating a subset community in the online world. Posts and tweets like the one above create an online personality of sorts for a company. The Book Loft often tweets with a voice appealing to the sarcastic and strange sense of millennial internet humor, wisely tailoring content to Twitter’s main demographic.
evening update:— The Book Loft (@TheBookLoft1) January 12, 2019
-books are good
-its snowing (a living hell)
-several dogs came in (nice)
-two Grown Men fell outside (idiots)
-postponed all sacrificial offerings due to blood showing up on snow (again, terrible)
-books are still good
Praise Malamarkus, Our Skeleton Lord
Meanwhile, its Instagram account with 5,045 followers takes advantage of an image-heavy platform by creating posts that are relevant and meaningful for all age groups with photos of local events, authors and their books, and the store itself.
Small businesses are also using social media to build each other up and weave themselves into a local network. In February, The Book Loft, Stauf’s Coffee Roasters, STUMP, and Glenn Avenue Soap Company banded together to create an Instagram giveaway with a prize of products from each Columbus-based shop in exchange for liking the relevant photo, tagging a friend in the comments, and following each company’s Instagram account.
Other indies know the power of social media as a marketing tool. Joseph-Beth Booksellers has a handful of locations scattered across Ohio and Kentucky in major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Lexington, with a dedicated social media account for each. The Twitter account @JosephBethCincy has 5,674 followers, including celebrity comedian and television host Ellen DeGeneres. The bio advertises “Cincinnati's indie bookstore—complete with coffee, crème brûlée and couches” and invites followers to connect with them on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook, too.
The Twitter account offers a variety of information, such as scheduled readings, events (like Quiet Puzzle Hour), articles about the bookselling industry and other literary news, and book recommendations. The Instagram account offers similar details visually, with many images of books and authors. There’s a weekly post called New Book Tuesday that features the covers of recent releases, and the account also announces an occasional giveaway.
By utilizing social media, bookstores are creating more than advertisements—they are promoting engaged communities. It’s no longer just about the announcement: It’s also about the likes, follows, comments, and retweets that accompany it.
But what does this mean for how indie booksellers are creating community in the real world? Their social media profiles demonstrate how physical stores are offering experiences that online stores simply can’t. You can go online and buy a book off Amazon Prime with a click and have it delivered to your house in two days, but a true bibliophile would find more joy experiencing the “32 rooms of discounted new books spanning an entire city block” in a quaint area of Ohio’s capital. I myself have spent hours wandering The Book Loft, perusing its shelves and consulting the map of the building that’s offered at the front of the store. And why get a cardboard box dropped on your porch in two days when you could go to Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati and complete your reading experience with “coffee, crème brûlée and couches”?
Not only do indie bookstores boast a more fun, tactile individual experience, but they create spaces for members of the community to celebrate their favorite authors and books together. Author readings, children’s storytime, and puzzle hours offer us more chances to interact with the books we enjoy and other local bookworms, too. It’s more intimacy than we’ll ever experience from our glowing screens.The Columbus Dispatch even ranked The Book Loft as one of the top 15 date spots in Columbus—news that the store was quick to share on its Twitter account when the article went live around Valentine’s Day. (I’ll even admit that my boyfriend made The Book Loft a stop on our agenda the first time I ever visited him in his hometown.) And then, of course, there are also the economic benefits that your town receives when you shop small and support local businesses.
The overarching irony is that social media is often critiqued for creating social barriers, whether we spend dinner with friends glued to our phones or spend our time wishing we could be the popular girl we see on Instagram with 2,000 followers. This irony also helps indies. Technology has primed us for a world that demands immediacy and constant efficiency and pulls us in a million directions at once. Having positive physical and personal experiences has become more exciting, meaningful, and gratifying. In the case of indie bookstores, reading books and browsing social media (which are normally regarded as independent activities) become tools that draw us together. Humans are inherently social creatures, and we need to belong to a community in order to survive. Indies use our internet addiction to transport us from our online societies and draw us to places and events in our real-world neighborhoods.
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