How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Author Brand

If you are having trouble deciphering the ins and outs of social media, the next few weeks here should help you. We are going to do a breakdown of the top three social media sites. Today is Facebook. This is probably the most familiar social media site to you; just about everyone and their aunt Lillian has a Facebook page. But, perhaps the idea of running your own author page seems daunting. Do not fear it is easier that you think.
Let’s start from the beginning. As we mentioned in the last post you will need a personal profile to start. So go to www.facebook.com and sign up. Remember this is your personal profile; you will want to keep it that way. This should be the space that you keep intimate with close friends and family. It should not be for posting about your author career. Michael Hyatt speaks to this in his interview with Amy Porterfield. There are several reasons for this:

• Managing your friends and readers will be difficult
• You can only have 500 “friends”
• You won't necessarily want your readers to see the personal things that you post, i.e. pictures of your children
• Your close friends and family may not be your target audience
• Keeping your personal life separate from your work life, to some degree, is always a good idea

Once you have your personal profile set up you will go to the left hand toolbar on your homepage and click the “create a page” link under “pages.”There you will see a button for “Artists, Band or Public Figure.” Click that and then choose author from the drop down menu and type in your name. You will set up the rest of your page just like you did with your personal profile. Add a profile picture and banner picture. Don't worry about readers being able to see personal information. You can change your security settings to limit who can see your information.

You should post something every day. If it is a quote from someone you like, or a speaking engagement, or sneak peak at your next project. We discussed some clever ideas for posting in our last blog. You can even schedule your posts. That way you can post multiple times a day, but your whole day doesn’t have to be consumed by social media. When you type in your status there is a drop down menu on the “post” button, and there is an option to schedule it. You want to send traffic back to the original content on your website as much as possible. Remember social media is a vehicle, not the destination.

In order to get people to “like” your page you can run targeted ads, promote your page on Facebook (just make sure you promote it to people in your target audience), and make sure to have a link to your Facebook page on every page of your website. You can also have a link in the signature of your email and put the information on all of your promotional material. You want to make it as easy as possible for your target audience to find you. And, then all you have to do is keep your posts fresh and interesting to that group and they will promote you all on their own.

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