Indie Author Facebook Tips
If you are an indie author, social media is definitely a tool you are going to want to utilize. In this blog post, we’re going to discuss Facebook.
You are going to link your Facebook page to your personal account. Now, if you write under a pen name, you might want to consider making an entirely new personal account. You personal account will come into play when exchanging likes with fellow authors. I will discuss more about that later on this blog post.
When you are ready to create your page, you will see that Facebook offers a lot of categories. I chose author for my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorAngelaSnyder They also have a category for books. As you can see, I created another page for my book: https://www.facebook.com/VampireNextDoorBook
It is very easy to switch between your personal account and your page(s). There is a drop-down menu (arrow) in the top right corner of your Facebook. The heading will read “Use Facebook as:”, and you will choose your page. To switch back, go to the menu again and select your personal account.
So now that you have your Facebook page set up, you are going to need some likes. A lot of people do not realize this, but if a page likes your page — it does not count! Only personal Facebook accounts will count as a like. So if you are exchanging likes with a fellow author, please make sure you are both liking from your personal accounts and not from your pages. You don’t want to get shorted, and you don’t want to short your fellow authors.
You need to get more than 30 likes before you can see your page insights. Your page insights let you see a lot of information such as likes, unlikes, how many people are viewing your posts, demographic info, page visits and much more. It’s very useful to see what time most of your followers are on Facebook, so that your posts can reach the maximum audience.
Now, how do you get likes? Getting likes can be a painstaking task, and it takes time unless you have a big following already. There are many ways that you can get likes, but most of them involve exchanging likes. Exchanging likes means exactly what it implies — I will like your page if you like mine. This is a great way to help out your fellow authors and get yourself some page likes at the same time.
There are some groups on Facebook you can join where you post your Facebook page link and exchange likes with fellow group members. Here are two groups:
You must join the group before you can post your Facebook page. Like with any group, read the rules before posting. The rules will be over on the right-hand side of the group under the banner.
There is another group that indie authors should be utilizing, and that is a retweet group. If you ever see indie authors posting a lot of RTs (retweets) on Twitter in one day, that is because they have probably joined one of these groups. The idea of the group is simple — You retweet (RT) another author, and they RT you. Everybody wins by helping each other out.
A way to find RT groups on Facebook is by utilizing the search. Type in RT, author, indie author, retweet group or any other combination of words. Usually when you join one group, more group suggestions will pop up. I will share one group that is great for indie authors who want to RT: https://www.facebook.com/groups/181934298640498/ As I said above, please read the rules before posting in the group.
The last tip I am going to share when it comes to Facebook is using other pages for your own promotion. Did you know you can post a link to your book once a week on Amazon Kindle’s Facebook page that reaches millions of people?
If you go to the page https://www.facebook.com/kindle, you will see (near the top right) a section that says “Recent Posts by Others on Amazon Kindle”. You will see the same thing (Recent Posts by Others) on other pages. Go to the left of the page where you can post and say something about your book and include the link. When you refresh the page, your post will show up under the “Recent Posts by Others” on the right.
Most pages encourage promotion, but do not go overboard. Once a week or once every two weeks is a safe bet that you won’t get banned from the page.
Do not post on fellow authors’ pages unless you are given permission. Would you want someone posting their book info on your page? I didn’t think so. 😉
Whatever book your category is in, search for a particular page in the Facebook search. If you write paranormal, search for pages that promote paranormal books. Paranormal Reads is an awesome Facebook page that even has an author day once a week that encourages authors to share all of their info and links for their 20,000+ audience. You can find them here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Paranormal-Reads/210602165622398
If your book is not paranormal, find another page that can help you. There are pages for Amazon Kindle, Kindle Fire, Nook and many more that you could post on to promote your book. Tip: If you see other authors posting in the “Recent Posts by Others”, you can post there too.
There are two Amazon Affiliate Facebook pages that promote authors/indie authors when the author/reader submits a form. These pages have 30,000+ and 80,000+ likes. That’s a lot of potential buyers for your book! Read the rules on the page before submitting the form. It’s very simple. If you need help, contact the page for more info. I’m sure they would be happy to help!
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Author Angela Snyder 