Updating a Facebook Page

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I don’t spend the time on Facebook that I probably should (it’s never been my favorite platform). But I understand the importance of Facebook to my overall social media presence. I know it’s where my readers are and I hear from them regularly there. I want to make sure that I’m available on the platform so that I can easily connect with my readers.

I realized last week that I really needed to perform some sort of Facebook page tune-up.  Sure enough, I found lots of things that needed to be updated or tweaked.

Ideas for areas to address on your own page:

First of all, it’s always a good idea to check your security settings and basic profile information.  I discovered that, in my contact section, Facebook had once again in all its wisdom decided to display my cell phone number. I removed it.

How is your bio?  Is your newsletter signup mentioned there?  A link to your book page?

You have the ability on your Facebook page to add a call-to-action button.  For authors, one of the best options may be the ‘shop now’ button (the newsletter signup button would also be a valuable option).  I link mine to my website’s book page, which links to all three series and each book at each retailer.  That way anyone can find my books at any retailer or on any reading platform.

A couple of other things are worthwhile to consider.  One is adding milestones to your Facebook page.  A milestone, when read in order, reads as a story on your Facebook page. You can add a milestone (and back-date it) to your Facebook page by going to your timeline and clicking ‘offer, event +’ and then clicking ‘milestone.’

There are probably plenty of ways we could implement milestones.  I chose to go very simply with it–I only correlated milestones with the releases of each book of each series.  You could do release dates, conferences, panels, great reviews: anything that helps you put across your brand and story best.

There is also an area where you can add videos.  I do have a couple of videos of me talking about mystery reading and writing (one that I uploaded to my Amazon Central page and one I was asked to create for an event that I wasn’t able to attend in person), so I did upload those to my Facebook page.

Unfortunately, checking the ‘do not show on my newsfeed’ box doesn’t mean your followers won’t get notified about your milestones or videos. So, just a heads-up…if you update everything at once (as I did), you might be unintentionally spamming your followers on Facebook.

Another important thing to check is newsletter signup integration.   If you use a service like MailChimp (free for up to 2,000 subscribers), have you connected your MailChimp account to your Facebook account?  Readers can then sign up for our newsletter from our Facebook page.  I went into that process a little more in depth in this post.

Have you done a Facebook page tune-up lately?  How do you use your Facebook page to connect with readers?

Checklist of Updates and Tweaks for Your Facebook Page:
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Photo via Visual Hunt

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