If you don’t have a personal Facebook page yet, you should give serious consideration to getting one. Facebook is the largest social networking site on the globe. Everyone on Facebook has a page on which they can post updates, photos, and videos about their life. A page can be set up so that either “friends” (and you get to approve who is your friend) or the public can see it. The social networking site offers an excellent way to reach potential readers.

To promote your book via Facebook, you’ll have to begin by setting up you personal page. It’s quite easy to do, and Facebook takes you through the entire process with a step-by-step tutorial. It’s also free to join.

Once you set up your personal page, you then can create a page just about your book. This page won’t contain all of those updates, photos and videos about your kids and trip to Mexico that you’ll soon be posting on your personal page.

To set up your business page, you should have jpegs on hand of your book’s cover and some vertical photo that might be used as your “cover.” The book cover will serve as your profile picture. The vertical cover photo could be of you at a book signing, a photo related to what your book is about (for example, a spacecraft orbiting the earth if you’re book is about why we should spend more money on space exploration), or a close-up of the book cover.

You’ll also want to write a description of your book in the “About” section.” This description essentially can be what you’ve placed on your back cover blurb or the home page of your website. Also, there is a spot where you’ll be able to place links to your website and blog, so be sure to do that.

What to post on Facebook? Anything that you might blog. Given this, I essentially post what I write for my Twitter feeds (which are just links to my blog) on Facebook. This may sound redundant, but not everyone on Facebook uses Twitter and vice versa. You’re just covering your bases.

To make Facebook truly useful, you’ll need to get “friends” to maximize the number of people who view your page and will potentially read your book Once you get friends then you can ask them to “like” your business page. Each time you make a post on the Facebook page for your book, it will go out to a “wall” where anyone who “likes” your page can read what you wrote (along with what all of their other friends wrote).

How do you get “friends”? You have to ask them to be your friend via Facebook (it’s a simple click or two of a button). Look for the following people on Facebook to be your friends:
• Family
• Friends (Makes sense, doesn’t it?)
• Colleagues past and present
• Former classmates (high school and college)
• Friends of lots of your friends (You may not know them personally, but you do have something in common!)
• Pages on related subjects and “like” or “friend” them (If you’re book is about coffee, seek out coffeehouses.)

All of your posts show up on each of your friends’ walls, so hopefully others who are not friends will take an interest in your page.

Some savvy Facebook users reduce some of this work simply by making their personal page their book page. If you do this, however, you’re counting on people to buy a book by an author rather than buying a book about a specific subject or from a specific genre. Since you’re a new author, you probably don’t yet have much name recognition to generate many book sales. People will come to you because of the book’s genre and subject matter, not because you wrote it.