That's a very interesting article. I ran a FB ad for a while, and it did generate likes for my FB page, but I didn't seen any significant changes in sales. Same with blog traffic (I keep all my own stats for analysis) and I see no correlations between blog traffic and sales. Now, I will grant you, I have low traffic on my blog and low sales (steady but low; average 4 a month), so I guess you could draw a correlation there BUT most visitors to my site are brought in by poetry and I have only one poetry compilation which does not sell (1 copy total, my fiancee) so draw your own conclusions there.
If anything affects my sales, aside from the blurb/cover art/quality of writing obvious things, it seems to be largely the amount of work I have up. My sales have steadily risen as I published more titles. Season has a definite effect and then there are random spikes that I can only assume are little word of mouth spreads (one title sold 8 copies last Feb, which was a huge jump from the 2 it had sold over the previous 3 months.)
I haven't put much effort into marketing or getting reviews and all of my work is currently short stories and novellas. Just recently I have updated some of my blurbs and tags and I'm hoping to see some changes there. In a few months I'm planning on adjusting my prices and seeing what that does.
I'm also nearly finished my next novel-length work and hope to have it up by November, if not sooner. I'm pretty excited to see what happens there, as I have a feeling there is a different dynamic to novel length sales. No stats or anything just a feeling.
But as far as social media, I don't really see it being a successful sales tool. At least, not for me. Maybe someone with more charisma could make it work but...
