Climbing to the top of Facebook as an author.
Facebook is currently one of the biggest social media sites. If you are serious about platform building you might want to consider establishing a presence on Facebook.
Who is using Facebook?
According to The London School of Economics and Political Science, there are approximately 42 million UK Facebook users. There are a further 307 million in Europe which (Brexit aside) presents the best opportunity for an expanded audience.
In the same report, it was found that Facebook’s gender split is 56% male and 44% female, with 24% of global active Facebook users being women between the ages of 18 and 34 years and 35% of global active Facebook users being men between the ages of 18 and 34 years.
- For use by generation see the Social Media page.
Facebook for product discovery
One report I looked at, suggested that Facebook drives more product discovery than any other platform.
Facebook pages and algorithms
To get ahead on Facebook you are going to want a Facebook page. A Facebook page is different from your user account and is not the same thing as a group. The page is the thing that fans “like” in order to get updates.
But there is a huge catch. “Boring” pages are rarely shown to the fans of the page. Facebook filters out the content of any page that fails to keep people engaged. They do this as a factor of time. Even a successful post that goes viral and is seen by millions of people will only carry you along for a short while.
To avoid being boring, you need to post one thing to your page every single day. Moreover, you will need to make sure that one thing gets people engaged.
Keeping your fans engaged on Facebook
Posts that ask open-ended questions get a lot of comments. This is good. Facebook rates comments as the most important engagement with shares close behind. Likes are helpful but they count for a lot less.
For any day that you do not have a blog post to share, schedule a picture, video, or an open-ended question. Your content does not have to be just about your books. In fact, you are likely to bore your fans if you keep droning on about your books every day. Instead, post fun, interesting, and provocative content.
It does not hurt to ask for users to share your content. “Share if you agree”, “Share if this describes you”, and similar prompts can easily reach more people than you have in your fan count.
Remember to like and share as yourself (rather than as your page) fairly often. Just not so often that your friends and family mute you because they are sick of your book posts.