As a marketing columnist for Book Business Magazine, my latest article is entitled, “Facebook Is Holding Your Readers Hostage.” Below is an excerpt with a link to the complete article. You’ll be shocked by what Facebook is doing…
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Many publishers believe that building a Facebook audience is a wise way to market books. Let’s run with that assumption for a minute. What if you succeeded in attracting a lot of Facebook fans? I mean really succeed, such amassing over 1,000,000 likes to your Facebook page.
You’d probably feel happy about your social media efforts. Plus, you’d probably expect to sell a lot of books to your Facebook audience, right? You could simply post information about your front list releases, back list titles, upcoming author events, special deals, etc. Then, sit back and watch as thousands of people respond. If only this theory worked in reality.
Instead, what if you were penalized for succeeding on social media? What if Facebook limited most of your own fans from seeing your posts? What if you tried to promote a new book, but only a tiny group received the news? What if you even offered something for free, but less than 10% of your fans got the chance to respond? How would you feel if your Facebook efforts began to backfire?
One of my consulting clients recently faced this dilemma. They are one of the most successful publishing houses on Facebook with over 1,000,000 likes. Their marketing staff worked hard for several years to attract such a large online audience. Everyone should be happy, and they should be selling lots of books to their Facebook fans. Yet, the more the publisher grows their Facebook audience, the more their situation worsens.
