AUTHOR: Diane McKeever

Social media has made the process of advertising your book both easier and harder. Easier in that anyone can do it, all you need is a little time and imagination. Harder because there are so many outlets and most of us don’t have the time to post to all of them. After all, we’re authors and our first priority should be to write books…right? Well, if no one knows about your books then what was the purpose in writing it in the first place? Let’s look at some of your options.

Where should you start your campaign? Facebook? LinkedIn? Pinterest? Twitter? Google+? Instagram?...the list goes on. The answer, of course, is to start where your target audience is. Unless you’re writing for young adults who are probably using Instagram or business professionals who are on LinkedIn, I would recommend starting with Facebook. Facebook reaches more than 900,000,000 unique monthly visitors (www.ebizmba.com - July 2014), wouldn’t you like to tap into that group?

Some people feel that they can use their personal page to advertise their book. Certainly you should be using it too to reach your friends, but do you really want your groupies seeing the pictures of your kids/grands birthdays or other very personal information you share only with your friends? When you set up a special Facebook author page you can post information that interests you so that your followers get to know you as the person behind the book. You can use the author page to control what the readers see about you.

Getting Started

Most of you already have Facebook accounts, or you should. In fact, in order to set up a business page, you must have a personal page. While you could promote your book from your personal page, a business page will give you greater resources and presence to expand your reach. To create your new business page:

1.     Log on to your personal Facebook account

2.     Look in the upper right side of the screen for the little pull down arrow and click it

3.     Choose “Create Page” from the drop down menu

4.     Choose your page category. There are six but as an author you’ll want to choose either “Artist, Band or Public Figure” or “Entertainment”. See the image below.

5.     Once you’ve made your choice (you should chose the “Artist, Bank or Public Figure” option) choose a category (Author) and give your page a name (your pen name). You can change your page name as often as you like until you have 200 likes.

6.     Click “Get Started”

Now the real work begins. Fill in the “About” section, which you can modify at any time, and upload a profile and cover picture. The cover picture should be designed in a PhotoShop type program using the dimensions shown below. Note how the profile picture overlaps the cover photo. Take this into consideration when designing the cover photo so important information is not hidden. Of course there are on-line services to help you with this important cover photo if you don’t have the skills or resources to do it yourself. You can change both the profile and cover photo as often as you want. There had been restrictions as to the content for the cover photo but these were lifted in 2013. Now, as long as the content isn’t “deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else's copyright (www.facebook.com/page_guidelines)”, you’re good to go.

What to post

Ah yes, what you should post. As I mentioned earlier, your readers want to get to know you better so here are some suggestions for posts:

·       Links to blog posts you’ve written on your blog or as a guest

·       Links to your book on popular book sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble

·       Links to reviews of your book

·       Engage with your audience by asking questions (Who was your favorite character in my book and why; If you could have lunch with an author, who would it be)

·       Ask for advice (Where would you like my next book to be set?)

·       Share links to causes that are of interest to you – of course you might want to be careful with this, you don’t want to alienate your followers

·       Hints/teasers about what might be in your next book

·       Contests with the winner getting a copy of your book

·       Upcoming events or book signings

·       Links to video clips

The point is that all of the posts should not be about buying your book…although that’s always the unspoken goal. When you get people to respond to your posts, reply back to them. Readers want to know that you are really listening to their responses.

How often to post

According to the socialbakers.com website, “if you post fewer than 2 posts a week, you will not engage your audience enough for them to maintain a social connection with you, and you will lose engagement. If you post more than 2 per day you will typically lose engagement.” Buffersocial.com is more specific, “2 times per day, seven days a week, 10:08 a.m. and 3:04 p.m.” Yikes, that a lot of posting, isn’t it? Remember four important points:

1)     not all post content has to be original,

2)     you can schedule your Facebook posts when you create them,

3)     author pages allow for others to post for you, so that intern you hired can be posting on your behalf, after you have reviewed the posts of course,

4)     there are services you can use to set up a series of posts for all of your social media updates.

How to get Likes

Once you’ve posted six to eight messages, you’re ready to invite fans to like your page. The reason that you want to wait until you have some posts is to let your fans see the types of things you will be posting. If they find the information timely and interesting, they’ll sign up. If you’re only posting “buy my book, buy my book” communications they’re likely to pass on your invitation.

Fans might stumble on your page and click the Like button so that they get your updates but you need to invite people to come to your page to like it. Here are some ways to get likes:

·       You can start by inviting all of your friends to like the page.

·       Add a link to your Facebook author page as part of your email signature.

·       Add a Facebook link to your Amazon author page, blog, website and other social media outlets.

This is a good start but eventually you’ll probably need to “boost” a post or two to really get things moving along. Your goal is to reach at least 30 likes. With that number you will get insights from Facebook on who is visiting your page (age, gender, location, language and lots more).

Boosting a post

At the bottom of every post is a blue “Boost Post” button. When you click on it you have an opportunity to expose thousands of Facebook users to the post for as little as $20. These are not just any Facebook users, these are users you define by their age, gender, location and interests. You can create many of these audience profiles as you would like. I created two that are the same except for the gender. I wanted to conduct an experiment to see if men or women respond to my posts the same way…and I found out that they don’t.

There are five actions that an individual can take on a boosted post, actually six if you count not doing anything at all as an action. They can click the link, like the page, like the post, comment or share. The two golden actions are like the page and share. When they like the page they will now be getting all of your new posts. When they share the post, the post goes on their timeline and all of their friends are now exposed to it, something like a good pyramid scheme. As you can see from the image below, for 33.90 (this was an ongoing boost) the post was seen by almost 15,000 people, which resulted in 106 actions. The link clicks brought them to my blog where they could read about the blog topic and, hopefully, click the link to buy my book!

Wrap-up

Diane McKeever’s first book, 100 Amazing Computer Tips, is a freelance software trainer/computer coach living in Osprey, Florida. For over twenty- five years she has provided computer guidance to more than 100,000 students at companies such as GTE, Gartner Group, GE and Aetna as well as working with individuals in their homes and small offices. She is as comfortable working with beginner users as she is with advanced professionals. She supports both the PC and Apple environments. Her work has earned her the title, Certified Patient Person, as she has been called by countless students over the years. More recently she has expanded her business and become certified as a Social Media Marketing Professional. She has lectured extensively to SCORE and Chamber of Commerce groups on the subject and has helped hundreds of businesses set up and use the power of advertising available through social media. Her energetic informative presentations will liven up your organization’s next meeting. Her extraordinary work has garnered her good press and she was featured on the TV program “Extraordinary Women Leading Extraordinary Lives”. Contact Diane (diane@dianemckeever.com) for your training or social media marketing needs.