Facebook: What Value to Authors?

Source

Among the things I did this past week was some research on social media and marketing. You’d think I’d have covered a lot of ground in this area already. I have, but I’m learning new things all the time.

If you’ve been dropping in for a bit, you’ll know that Facebook is one of the options I’ve been looking at for advertising. I’ve been holding back because I placed an ad on a review site and wanted to be able to track how that’s doing before I run ahead and do anything else.

I think I’ll probably opt in for the Facebook ad sometime this week. I’ve gone this route before with my first novel. I didn’t do a good job of tracking how many sales for Contraband came from that ad, but I do know I got over 300 likes. An aside here, having got these ‘likes’, I haven’t capitalized on them at all by making the page interactive and keeping readers interested by posting fresh details ever so often, which is why I think having an author page on Facebook is wiser than doing a page for each novel. A further aside here, In linking the page, I discovered that I’ve had three new ‘likes’ in the past couple of weeks and no update on my part. Yikes!

That’s a mistake I made and I’m contemplating taking down the pages for Dissolution and Hardware. The only reason I’m hesitating on deleting the Hardware page is that the book is written under a pen name and gets very little exposure already.

That said, in one of the books or articles I read this week I noted that a study claimed that 1 in 8 minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook. Interesting stuff. Now what if I did all I could to make my author page interactive and bring value to readers?  I think I’d definitely see some movement in my numbers. I keep forgetting that when fans see something I’ve posted, people in their timeline are also privy to that information. A good and not-so-good thing about Facebook, which has 750 million active users, according to Hubspot. I have noticed in recent times, a massive increase in the number of writers actively marketing through Facebook.

Something else I picked up is that it’s good to ‘like’ pages in that people will reciprocate if they like what you’re doing. Okay, so this is obvious, but I don’t ‘like’ enough, I think.

Having written a good book, I’m always going to be looking at ways to maximize its presence. For now, at the pace I’m going, this is going to be a sneak attack as I move through the different things I want to do to promote Distraction. I think a blog tour will definitely be in order, but I want to do something fun and different.  Still chewing on that as I want to feature Jamaica in there somewhere. Big time.

BTW – A friend of mine is putting together an around-the-world blog hop during the Olympics, so if you live in a far-flung place or maybe your novel is set somewhere you consider exotic, drop me a line here or email me, so I can add you to the list of interested bloggers/writers.

As to the stuff I’ve been reading this week:

• How to Use Facebook for Business: An Introductory Guide (Hubspot) I get their newsletter www.hubspot.com which I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to, but I should. They publish a lot of useful information on harnessing social media for publicity.

• Online Marketing Tips for Authors – Tyora Moody

I’ve also been reading about how to maximize on free book promos and Goodreads giveways. I’m getting quite an education, which is long overdue.

For those of you who do market though Facebook and have author pages. Are you doing enough to keep your fans engaged or is your author not yet where it ought to be, kinda like mine?