Happy Tuesday, everyone!
Last week, I wrote about tips and tricks for using Twitter, and many of you were kind enough to chip in with your thoughts. Today, I want to talk about Facebook. As always, I hope you’ll all chime in with your own experiences and wisdom!
The first decision you need to make is whether to go with a page or a personal profile. I’d suggest both, as some readers will want to ‘friend’ you, and others are more comfortable with more formal interactions. Plus, Facebook caps the number of friends at 5,000, so it’s good to have another place where readers can find you. If you’re not comfortable accepting readers on your personal page, you can always tinker with the privacy settings to control what they can see — or simply direct them to your page.
I’ve noticed some authors set up a page each time they release a new book. The problem with this is they then need to drive readers towards a separate page each time they have a new project. It makes more sense to have one central author page where you can announce new releases and build your audience.
Make sure to name your author page with your name and something that differentiates it from your profile page (for example, Author Talli Roland or Talli Roland Books). You can only change your page name if you have under 200 ‘likes’, so choose carefully.
Install the Facebook ‘badges’ on your blog, and make sure to include the link to your page in your newsletter and in the back matter of your novels. The easier it is for people to find you, the more ‘likes’ you’ll have.
Although your page is for fans of your work, don’t abuse it by posting endless reviews and promo-pieces. Remember, if you clog your readers’ streams too much, they can ‘unlike’ you with the click of a button. Reward them with exclusive Facebook contests, giveaways, or sneak peeks. Make them feel special.
And finally, don’t forgot to be you. Although readers want to keep up to date with your news, they also want to get a glimpse of the author behind the book. Be positive, be personable, and remember that Facebook is as much about building relationships as it is about promotion.
How do you use Facebook to connect with your readers?
Good advice offered here. I think one needs to have an ‘author’ page and a Facebook page. I think it can be daunting for a friend to be faced with fan posts; they could feel excluded and lost.
Luckily there are so many ways of connecting with readers now! So hopefully, one can choose what’s an author page’ and what’s a ‘friend’ page.
That’s a great point, Carol:
“I think it can be daunting for a friend to be faced with fan posts; they could feel excluded and lost.”
Must think about that one for awhile…
Thank you for mentioning this.
Hi Carol! I agree. Likewise, it can be daunting for a fan to be faced with loads of personal posts from an author’s friends. I think having both is a good idea.
Terrific advice , Talli. Thanks!
Pleasure, PJ!
Great post, Talli!
To Facebook Page or Personal Profile?
Tis the question…without an easy answer.
For now, until I get closer to my 5000 Friend limit (I’m almost to the half-way point), I’m sticking with my personal profile because I luuuvvv the interaction it allows me! I get sooo frustrated with our WG2E and RG2E Pages because you just don’t get the community building interaction there. I always feel like we’re talking to ourselves on those pages instead of really getting to know and interacting with our peeps. Sure, Pages are great for info disbursement, but I want sooo much more than that with my fan base.
Hopefully, by the time I have to switch, they’ll make the Pages more fan-friendly.
I agree pages don’t allow the same interaction, which can be frustrating. But as fan, would I want to know an author at such a personal level? I don’t know if I’d ask to be friends with some of my favourite authors, personally. I’d rather just like their pages and keep up to date with their news. I hope that the pages do evolve to be more interactive!
Great advice. I have a personal page and an author page. Originally, I wanted to keep my personal page separate from my work, but it hasn’t worked out like that!
Sibel, that was my plan originally, too. Ah well!
Excellent post, Talli. I always struggle with whether or not to post something on my author page and my personal page, since there’s a lot of overlap. I like the metrics of the author page, but it feels like a shirt that’s a size too small when it comes to interacting my followers. D.D. said it right. (duh!)
Cheers, Y’all
I struggle with that, too, Greg. I try to find a happy medium and stagger promo posts on both sites, but if it’s something big-ish, I might share on both pages.
Great advice. I have both … well three accounts. One for family, one for my writing friends, and a fan page. This means I can organise what I want to share with which group of folk in my life. It works well for me.
Hi Talli
Very useful, straightforward advice, thank you. Looking forward to having you with us tonight at Byte the Book at the Ivy later
Justine
Hi Justine! Thank you, and it was lovely to see you last night. Great event.
Thanks for the great post. I set up a Facebook page with my name for the release of my book, and keeping the personal page from the Facebook page was often confusing. Thanks to your help, I’ve just added the title “writerc” before the name of my Facebook page. One less annoyance to deal with!
I really wish I could change the name of my page. I made the mistake of NOT adding in ‘author’ or ‘writer’ to my page, and now it’s too late.
I have both. I have an author profile. And 2 pages (1) for my Middle Grade series (2) for my YA series and that’s all I’m having. The other feature I love about Facebook is the ability to have my Release Parties on Event Pages and by having multiple pages I have the ability to reach a larger range of my readers since the aggregator only shows your comments to a certain number of readers.
That’s a good point, LM – the event pages are great! And if you’re addressing different markets, it certainly makes sense to have different pages.
Thanks Talli, I learned (yet again) something new and valuable from this blog.
I didn’t know you could change the user name of a fan page after it had been set up. I was told at a workshop a while back, that once you chose a page name it was set in stone. For me, a well meaning friend set up a fan page for me as a surprise after I had written my 1st novel and they set it up using the 1st novel’s title. Well now I’m on my 4th novel and I’m writing under two names it just wasn’t relevant anymore but I didn’t want to lose the fans I’d built up over the years by deleting it and starting over.
I was lucky enough to be just under the 200 likes limit so I just changed my page name to my author name (names) YAY!!!
Thanks so much for this information.
Pleasure – glad to help!:)
Thanks for a great article, Talli.
I find FB so confusing and although I’ve set up three pages, Personal, Author and Website, I still don’t know what I’m doing on there half the time.
Does anyone know how I can stop my posts on the author page from automatically showing up on my home/profile page. And any ideas on how to attract readers to my author page? At the moment I’ve only 11 friends, mos of whom are personal friends anyway.
Lynda, did you ‘like’ your author page, or is someone tagging you? That’s the only reason I can think of why your page comments are showing up on your profile page. Perhaps you’re commenting on your page using your personal profile and not your page profile? There’s something at the very top of your page that shows who you are commenting as. It’s quite confusing!
As for attracting readers – I’ve found it very helpful to put a link in the back matter of your book, and also on your blog and in your newsletters, etc.
Great tips, Talli. I wish I’d thought a bit more about this before I opened a page for a book written under a pen-name. Of course, it’s a lot more work trying to keep up with pages for different books.
It is indeed! That’s why I decided to do one central page only — less work!
I have both an author page and a profile page, and I interact periodically on both. I have a question, though. I used to be able to post on my author fan page as my fan page even if I was under my profile.
Now I have to make the switch every time I do it, which is frustrating, because sometimes I forget. It’s a recent change that I noticed on Facebook, even though I still have the box checked that says post as page even when posting from my profile.
Talli, have you (or anyone else) run into the same problem?
Yes, I’ve noticed this recently,too, and I have had the same problem. Very annoying!
Excellent advice, Talli! And Delaney, I find that annoying too. For somebody just starting out on FB, I’d say just have an author page and nothing else.
I especially like the advice not to start too many FB pages. Same with blogs. Don’t fragment your audience, or make them jump through hoops. You’ll just lose them.
Exactly, Anne. Too many blogs, too many pages . . . not only does it fragment the readers, it’s too complicated to keep them all up to date!
I have a personal page for friends, and family (although I am friends with some authors and bloggers on there too) and then a separate author page. I made the mistake of calling my fan page “Just Friends With Benefits” (the title of my book) hoping it would draw interest just by virtue of the “sexy” name. It did, but now that I have a second book coming out, I really wish I had just called it “Meredith Schorr Author” and now it’s too late. I really wish I could change it but I don’t think I can. And I also do not want to start a new page because I have a feeling getting all of the original people to also like the new page will not be easy. Live and learn!
Meredith, if you have under 200 ‘likes’, you can change the name. And live and learn seems to be the name of the game when it comes to social media. I wish I could go back and start again sometimes!
I never thought I’d wish I had less fans on FB! Well over 200. Oh, well.
I have both. I have the author page where I post about anything to do with my ebooks and the personal one is to do with anything else inc other writing projects that aren’t to do with my books.
Sounds like you’re on the right track, Julie!
Really make sure you will interact on the Facebook author page. I’m working on that myself. Treat it like a blog. Because only people who REGULARLY check that/interact with you will get the posts. Even if you have 2,000 likes, if only 20 people regularly check in, that will be your “reach” or what Facebook will allow to go into someone’s feed.
Completely OFF TOPIC but vitally important…. Kobo WritingLife just went out of beta, meaning we can all publish directly to Kobo, go free whenever we want, AND get 70% with no download fees on prices from $1.99 to $12.99.
Great point, Elizabeth. It’s something I’m working on, too.
And thanks for the update on Kobo WritingLife! It’s definitely on my list to check out. Whoop!
I find Facebook confusing too – I have my personal page, which I’ve had for years and is just for real friends – i.e. people I actually know – and an author page. But I have to check the photo each time I post to see who I’m posting under, and sometimes if I got to like someone else’s page I do it under the ‘wrong’ account without even realising it!
Lynda asked about her posts to her author page appearing on her personal page – this happens to me too, but I think it’s because I ‘liked’ my author page so now I get that as a kind of news stream. I’m still trying to get used to the timeline set up!
I think that’s a new feature. Whenever I posted on my page, it used to default to my page identity. Now, it doesn’t, and I have to make a point to change it. Soooo annoying!
I must admit, I don’t find FB very intuitive.
Decisions, decisions. I haven’t started an author page and really don’t want another thing to keep up with, but you make some excellent points here, the one one for me being that we should add our FaceBook link in the back of our books so fans can follow us if they want to. I realize that posts will only go out to a few followers, like you mentioned. One of Kristen Lamb’s posts last month mentioned that FB is charging authors so their posts go out to everyone. And they’re charging a hefty fee, which isn’t feasible for most of us. At that point, I decided to skip starting an author page, but now I see that it might be convenient for my readers. When I start an author page, I’ll keep thing in perspective and not expect my posts to be seen by everyone who “likes” my page.
And I like DeeDee’s advice to make it fun for the readers. I’m a children’s author, so I’ll keep that in mind, make it fun for kids and their parents. Thanks for this very helpful post. All the comments have been helpful, too!
I decided to have a page for the very reason that I myself probably wouldn’t request friendship, but I’d want a place where I could check in on an author’s news. It’s irritating how FB is changing how pages function.
**Lurker here for a while, feel like I know everyone, but first time posting.**
I have a personal profile that I’ve had for years. When I started writing seriously I created my “real name” fan page and invited friends / family to like it. That’s where I keep info about my writing under my real name.
I also have a fan page for a pen name and for my write-for-fun blog.
So I have a personal profile and three fan pages.
I like to keep all my writing stuff under my pages instead of my personal page, but with a page you can’t join groups. I also discovered that if you “like” another page with your page, it doesn’t count. A “like” has to be from a profile. The problem with that, like I said, is I like to keep all my writing stuff under my page persona, especially for my pen name. There may come a time when I need to create a profile for my pen name, but it’s been my understanding that Facebook doesn’t want someone to create a personal profile for a “fake” person.
I was glad to find the Kindleboards thread where you like other authors and they like you. But again, the issue is that I had to “like” them using my personal profile instead of my page, and I’m not really a true fan. So I’m having to hide all their posts in order to see the ones from friends / family. I don’t think I’ll participate in something like that again. After all, we want likes from readers / fans, right? Not authors doing us a favor and then having to hide our posts.
But then I went back and liked them with my fan page, even though it doesn’t count on their likes, so that I could see their news stream when I was on my page and wanted to see it.
One day I may set up a new personal profile for me as an Author along with the fan page, but for now I just prefer to keep my profile personal. I want to have a ton of readers one day, but they don’t need to know all about my high school reunion or see pictures of my family.
Hi Christina! Thanks for coming out of lurk mode.
I’m sure I’ve liked other pages with my page profile? Perhaps that was back in the good ole days when you could actually do more with pages. But that’s a good point about groups.
You can like other pages with your author page, but it doesn’t “count” toward their likes. If you notice someone has 20 likes and they’re trying to get to 25 or 30 to get the username, if you like them with your fan page and not your personal profile you’ll notice their number of likes stays the same.
Thanks, Talli! I didn’t know about some of that – like the 200 friend title change limit.
My pleasure, Deniz!