Facebook Marketing

Ok so you’ve published your book. Now people have got to see it. Don’t assume thousands of people will just find your book on Amazon and you’ll vacationing in the Caribbean off of the royalties. You have work to do. One of the best means of getting seen besides a companion website with a blog, is to make a Facebook fanpage. You must have a personal Facebook page to create a fanpage. You’ve seen them and probably liked a few of them. The main difference is you like a fan page whereas you friend someone on a personal page.

So how to get followers? Run a Facebook ad. You can find information about making a campaign here on Facebook’s business pages. Do yourself a favor and search youtube for people who show how they’ve gone about this. There are several different options on how to run ads on Facebook, you can boost posts which get them seen more often, pay when someone clicks thru to your website, etc. We recommend instead that you spend a great deal of time and place a lot of content on your fan page, with every post containing the URL of your website (good idea to make one for the book) and/or where it’s for sale. Then when you run a Facebook ad pay for likes.

A few benefits here. Some people will click through to your website and maybe you get a new subscriber to your blog but they didn’t ‘like’ the Facebook page? New reader for free! The people who do like the page cared enough about your content to want to be a part of your social media presence.

In the Facebook Ad Manager under Budget & Schedule You can set the Bid Strategy to ‘Set a bid Cap’. You can set When You Get Charged to ‘Pages Likes’. Note with this option the minimum daily budget must be $25. So don’t forget to schedule to run for a short duration while you test this out.

Okay here’s the secret part, don’t tell Facebook we told you. You bid on how much you are willing to pay for a like. Facebook will suggest an amount. If they suggest something outrageous like $4.00 per like, type in between 50 and 75 cents instead. See what happens. If you find it isn’t working, slowly increase the amount. Give it a day or two each time you move the amount higher. Often if you widen the demographic you can get likes still relevant to you at a fraction of facebook’s recommendation for price. Once you have a thousand followers or so and they start sharing the posts you’ll have a real following.

Facebook advertising is very targeted. You can pick your demographic by gender, location, age, income etc. So think about who your best target demographic is and target them specifically. If your book is about a woman’s life growing up in Brooklyn for instance, why not run a campaign that targets only women in Brooklyn first? you can even target those women interested in reading fiction.

Oh and one other thing, Facebook ads have to be mostly pictorial. Less than 20% type. So, if you put a lot of text on them they will be rejected. You may want to use the cover art from your book. Initially it may get rejected. There is a button you can push to appeal this, wherein presumably an actual human being looks at the image. Often they will allow it after this check. Think about what image will get people to click thru to like your page.