Facebook can be an incredibly powerful tool for promoting your book, but so far you may not be seeing the great results you want. Setting up a dedicated fan page for your book is only the beginning; a few marketing tactics will get your Facebook page bringing in the numbers and therefore the readers for your new book.
For a small fee, you can set up advertising to promote your book, include sponsored content and add specific optimization to your Facebook posts. All of these methods will boost your page’s visibility to your target audience based on their other activities on the social site.
Using Ads to Your Advantage
You’ve probably seen those “Boost this post” or “Promote this page” messages when you’ve added something new to your book’s Facebook page. Opting for these ads will give you noticeably more reach than the organic page reach that comes from Facebook users finding your page naturally. Using a third-party application, you can create custom ads, target them to specific reader demographics and test-drive them to see which of them has the best page reach. To better understand which ads will get those results, it’s important to first look at the two main forms of Facebook paid ads: sponsored stories and promoted posts.
Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories
A promoted post on your Facebook page is simply a new message you add, a link you share or a photo you post as normal in the “What’s on your mind?” box. The difference is that you then opt to designate it as a promoted post for a nominal fee. As a result, it will appear near the top of each of your followers’ news feeds, increasing their likelihood of clicking over to your page.
Sponsored stories are promoted more organically based on how many people have recently liked or commented on one of your posts about your book. Their interaction then shows up to their other Facebook friends who have similar interests. Adding sponsored stories allows your readers to make recommendations to one another, and many people are more responsive to this advertising method than they are to clicking small paid ads in the sidebar of your page.
In the next post, we will continue with a few more ideas to use Facebook to promote your new book.