Like many authors before me, when my first book was published, I decided to create a Facebook page. Over time the ‘Likes’ of my page have grown to about 780. However as my ‘Likes’ have grown the reach for my posts has been rapidly diminishing. This is because Facebook makes arbitrary decisions about who can see posts and despite having 780 followers the average recent reach has been less than 30!
Of course, FB is not a charity and they want to make money so they provide the option to boost a post so it will reach a wider audience. I have been sceptical about paying to boost and this was reinforced when I ran a trial boost to all my followers and their friends. There seemed to be no resulting sales and just a few likes of the post.
This made me start to question the value of Facebook but I decided to give it one last try and boost a different post. This was when I properly discovered targeting the post. When I thought about my first post I realised that boosting the post to followers and their friends probably meant I was reaching mostly authors and people who already knew me. What I wanted was to share my exciting news with brand new contacts who might then go buy my book. Well I discovered that FB allows you to target by a wide variety of tags so for my second boost I targeted FB users in the USA who were specifically interested in reading thrillers and a couple of other relevant tags to further refine my audience.
The response was significantly better than my first trial and I reached thousands of new potential readers and saw an immediate impact on sales. Currently I run a boosted post every week and target everything from readers in my home town to people who enjoy certain technology. I should be clear though that I have not yet recouped my investment with the increase in sales but for the time being I am happy to be extending my reach and finding new readers.
I am still refining my posts but going into 2015 will definitely be using FB to help drive sales. I now have almost as many sales each month in the USA as UK which isn’t just down to FB but it has certainly played a significant part.
I am still pissed off that FB don’t share my posts with all my followers and in the past I have had other reasons to be fed up with FB but I thought it worth sharing my experience of boosting posts and the quite granular targeting that is possible.