Promotion has become social, and Facebook is where the largest social group of people currently gather online. If you build a website, they will come. But sometimes only if they have followed a link to your website from Facebook.
Tom Stier
Many business owners, authors, entrepreneurs and artists see Facebook as a silly waste of time. For most users, that is what it is. But, for users who establish a personal account for the purpose of setting up a public Facebook page for their business or service, it can be a way to get noticed by quite a few people, silly or not.
If you are new to Facebook, it begins with getting comfortable using the platform. You may not want to spend time connecting with friends on your personal page, but the activity can help you with gaining understanding of the conventions of interacting. Think of it as training for the work you will be doing on your business page.
How much time will all this ‘interacting’ take me?
For a Facebook business page, I recommend a manageable routine of regular posts, in your artist or writer persona, talking about the background of your work or book, posting on related topics such as the setting of your work, social and cultural situations that inform the work, and related news items.
If your work is controversial or political, know that you will turn off some segment of potential buyers. Then again, it may be a positive.
Over time you will see that some posts are of more interest to more people than other posts, and you’ll want to adjust strategy to provide more of that type of posting.
It is good form to Like other business, authors and related Facebook pages as your Page identity. This is something that many people using Facebook for promotion fail to do. Engaging can lead to more readers interested in your work, and reciprocal Likes from other pages.
How much time this will take you could be as little as an hour a day. Like your WordPress website, it is possible to schedule a week or so worth of postings in one sitting. It also depends on your ability to come up with the content that will engage your visitors.
Many of my clients ask me to help them with writing, editing, and/or posting their content – others prefer to do it themselves. It’s up to you.
Promo flow chart
A good work routine should include short postings and shares on your Facebook page interspersed with longer postings on your website. These posts are then shared as ‘teasers’ links in your posts on Facebook.
Ultimately, you want to bring visitors to your website where they will see more information and get motivated to purchase your book. If they like what they see, they will share content on the site on their Facebook feed.
Many successful Facebook pages post daily. The daily posts can be just a short tip, favorite quote, or a cartoon. Something you might have ‘just lying around’. 😉
The more you, the person with the expert knowledge of your work, can participate, the better.
It’s a fact that content creators tend to be busy running their business, and artists are sometimes more successful at expressing themselves through images. Alas, the web is a writer’s medium, and always will be.
Proxy posting to the rescue
This is where ‘proxy’ posting can can help ‘fill in the blanks’ between your personal postings.
If you find it difficult to do the amount of posting you’d like, we can put together a program for you where you will have regular ‘fill-in’ posts, on your website and on Facebook. This can work very well in concert with your own personally composed posts.
We can work up a posting plan with an affordable monthly budget for proxy postings over the course of a year. We’ll set up news alerts based on your book’s keywords, and advise on reciprocal opportunities for you. The posts will be custom tailored to your niche market. The more you can participate, the less you will need to rely on paid content.
As your readers see that there are regular postings on your website and Facebook, they will look forward to your next posts.
Why don’t I just do Facebook Ads?
For some content creators, the prospect of engaging in a program of free content creation to promote their content product seems … daunting. Why not bypass all this by just running Facebook Ads?
The reason I stress the steps I mention above, is that they are all prerequisite to the larger step of paying for ‘reach’ on Facebook.
You can set up ads targeted to an audience likely to be interested in your work. But, think of where you will be sending them. Will there be a free offer? Will your Facebook page and website show a large amount of expertise and interaction? As marketing guru Neil Patel says “You can’t possibly expect people to convert, if you’ve got nothing useful to share with them.”
And ‘share’ is the magic word on Facebook. If you are not sharing like the other children, you are making a social gaffe.
But, yes, once a respectable level of sharing activity is reached, then it makes sense to introduce paid Facebook Ads to reach your larger audience. They will want to see the wonderful things you have been talking about on your website and on Facebook.