When you do a lot of work with internet marketing, it doesn’t take long to find (or in my case, get emails) about how someone got 100,000 Facebook likes in 48 hours. They sell a plan to use Facebook Ads to get the word out about their fan page and get a ton of likes.
Sounds too good to be true? It is.
Getting so many likes in a short period will only happen with specific circumstances which include:
- a fan page about a “hot button” topic such as politics or religion
- create an ad with alost no description like “Click like if you’re for/against this topic”
- spend $1000 in advertising
Unless your book is about a hot button topic, I’m against using this strategy. There is one big reason:
It doesn’t make financial sense.
When I think about spending money on marketing, I always come back to the question: “If I spend $X on advertising, will I get at least that much money back on book sales?”
While it’s true that you can get potential likes on facebook with a (I’ll just say it) potentially misleading fan page these likes don’t translate directly to book sales.
In the scenario above, they spend about 2 to 3 cents for each like (and get many others from the viral nature of Facebook). On average, most authors spend between $0.60 and $1.25 PER like when marketing their pen name/book using facebook ads! Unfortunately, their are many authors that have spent $100 for 70 or 80 likes…and gotten exactly ZERO addititional book sales.
If you are just starting out, my suggestion is to save your money (or at least closely monitor your ad and make sure it makes sense!).