I know you’re wondering how a week of marketing on Facebook did for me. The bottom line, it was decent for the amount of time I put into it. I want this to be the overall lesson:
When you don’t have a lot of time, you can still make connections with REAL people. EVERY week it will build on itself and you’ll be amazed what happens over weeks/months/years.
Let me start this by saying I spent approximately 2 hours total (counting 30+ minutes on the “ugly” section below). I didn’t have any amazing content or posts to share.
I primarily used the strategy outlined in my post on using your personal page to get likes – which is to join groups, comment, and interact. During the week, I posted about 3 times and responded to about 10 posts.
The Good:
In my personal account, I’m now up to 134 friends, so I also added about 65 people to it. That’s ok, but the real fireworks were on my fan page which is where I wanted it.
Once you get to 30 likes on your fan page, you get access to “Insights” which gives you a lot of good data such as:
Week 1 Results
I can see each post – and I can see the effect on each post. So notice that I suddenly – after 1 week, had a reach of 300 on my fan page. That’s right, about 300 people saw at least 1 of my posts from the week when I have 64 likes :). That’s pretty cool – but the even better number is 27,821 friends of fans number. That tells me that if I have a “home run” awesome, viral piece of content – I can reach all of those people.
The Bad:
Time. There’s never enough of it. I know as an author, you’ll have many weeks like this. Do what I did – just interact when you can. If you can only do one post or response, that has to be enough some days.
Friending too Fast: As I interact with people, I send them a Facebook friend invite. I do my best not to send random invites but sometimes people don’t realize who you are or even know if you’ve responded to something. I’m pretty sure that someone I interacted with clicked “I don’t know this person” – and since Facebook is making there rules more strict about invites, I got a message from them warning me to make sure I really know them before sending an invite. The goal is not to be a spammer – but to make real connections with people that might be interested in your book.
The ugly:
Someone didn’t like one of my responses in a Facebook group (the response was about connecting with real people in Twitter). Turned out he was an advocate of spamming and wanted to sell his $28 “niche marketing” ebook (47 pages) to authors. It’s clear that I was very threatening to him which is probably why he went after me in the group.
I’m only human 🙂 and I have a huge pet peeve of seeing authors ripped off because they don’t know any better. I responded a couple times trying to explain the importance of an author platform and connecting with people – when I should have just ignored it.
Many lessons for me here: This probably wasted 30 minutes of my already limited time for the week, I don’t want to be associated with spammers in any way, and ultimately, authors need to decide for themselves.
I’m really enjoying this series so far! I’ve just set up a facebook page and I’m getting started trying to interact and so forth. However, I don’t want to use my personal page to join groups etc. (because I want to keep my pen name strictly separate from my real name). I notice that as a page, I can’t comment on personal profiles, and “Likes” from other pages (my author buddies!) don’t count either it seems. Any tips?
Hi Selene,
Great! I hope it’s helpful! I was a little nervous about including the bad and ugly sections above, but want to be as honest and open as I can. Please send me a DM on Facebook and I’ll be happy to connect with you and Like your page (if I haven’t already) and find out more about your book(s).
My wife keeps her fan page and personal page separate. It’s totally ok to do this! It has a few limitations, but you can still build your page likes. It is a bit slower when you first start without it, but longer term, it will mostly even out.
If you haven’t already, take a look at the tips on using your page to get more likes: http://www.killerbookmarketing.com/secrets-marketing-book-facebook/ The trick will be interacting “as your pen name page” as much as you can on other pages and posting good, interesting content people will want to share. Try to spend 50% of your Facebook time on your page posting and sharing good info and 50% of the time.
Resist the temptation to create a separate personal profile for your business (author pen name). I know a lot of authors do this, but Facebook has already made it clear that it’s against their terms of service and that they can and will delete accounts if they catch this. I’d hate to spend months building an account only to have it deleted.
For your author buddies, their “likes” of your page should count. Facebook doesn’t show all the people and pages that like your page, but you should see the count go up. On my page, I can only see about 40 names, even though I have more than 60 likes.
Thanks again and keep at it!
Mike P.
HI Mike,
When people like my page as a page, I don’t get any notification about it, and it doesn’t seem to count among my likes. I googled it, and it seems to be expected behavior? See e.g. this link:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Facebook-Fan-Page-Likes-Do-3074317.S.51012482
Since most of my author buddies are also using Facebook as a page, it’s been really slow going getting Profile likes.
Anyway, keep up the good work! 🙂 I’ll be following the rest of the series with interest.
Selene