Salve Facebook Romans! (Err, I mean real Romans!) As I’m recovering from the release of Steel Praetorian, I’ve been thinking about some things in my writing world I’d like to change.
Today we have a great article written by yours truly about Facebook and Advertising. Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter and other social media sites) seems to occupy more and more off our lives, and everyone seems to be on it all the time. But does this popularity translate into more sales?
So up front: Over the last four years as an author I’ve spent roughly $360 on boosting posts or running advertisements on Facebook. I’ve also spent about $200 advertising on Google, but that was only during the first two novels, and not at all for the recent ones.
What did this money do? Did it gather a few clicks on my links? Surely. Did it sell a bunch of people on my books? Probably not. People don’t search Facebook for products to buy.
“But I see advertisements all the time on Facebook!”
Yea – do YOU click on them? Or do you open a new browser window and type in the product to go to bing or google or yahoo or another search engine to find out more?
When I was running Google advertisements, I definitely had better results – more click throughs directly to the advertisement page, instead of encouraging people to ‘like’ a page or post.
Someone told me a long time ago that 100 dedicated followers are better than 1,000 forgetful ones (or something to that effect) but the statement holds true. Your real followers have already subscribed to your blog, bought your books, and Liked you on Facebook.
So I’m not planning on spending any more money on Facebook in the foreseeable future. Instead, I plan on doing the following.
- Blogging more
- Investigate advertising again on Google, Amazon, or Goodreads, all areas where I can more easily focus my advertising on people who don’t just ‘like’ things but are already involved in purchasing/learning more about Steampunk/Alternate History.
- Blog Swap More!
- Tweet More
- Facebook Post more – this is free and builds your audience as well, especially when linked to Twitter!
- Run additional giveaways on Goodreads and try the new function on Amazon.
- Run a sale through Smashwords on a ‘flash sale’ for Brass Legionnaire or other novels/novellas!
Fellow Authors – What do you think? Is advertising on Facebook worth it? Or is advertising not worth it at all?
Modern Papyrus 