When you have a facebook Fanpage, a lot of what you’ll be doing to keep it active is posting links. We wanted to quickly show you how to post a link properly so it looks nice and clean.
Once you copy and paste the link into the share box and a thumbnail loads, you’ll want to erase the long URL.
This way, the link looks nice and clean, as seen below:
If you leave the long URL in the post, it looks messy and confusing, see example below:
Happy link sharing!
Hootsuite is a great program for managing your twitter account. Main benefits?
Facebook is a great way for authors to connect with fans and spread the word about their book. In this book we’ll talk about the differences between having a Facebook profile and a Facebook Page.
Visual Example of the difference:
Facebook Profile
Facebook page
Facebook profiles are meant to represent a single individual. Organizations of any type are not permitted to maintain an account under the name of their organization. We have created Facebook Pages to allow organizations to have a presence on Facebook. These Pages are distinct presences, separate from user profiles, and optimized for an organization’s needs to communicate, distribute information/content, engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fan’s recommendations to their friends. Facebook Pages are designed to be a media rich, valuable presence for any artist, business or brand.
If you create a profile for your business, your account may be disabled for violating our Terms of Use. If you have questions about how to best leverage your Facebook Page, please check out our Insider’s Guide or FAQ.
Main differences:
Read to start a page? Click here to learn how to set one up.
When you do, unfortunately there is no way to automatically convert your profile friends to likes/fans, besides just posting the link to your new page on your profile and asking people to become a fan/like the page.
Make Facebook Updates Visible to Fans in Specific Locations
Hot Tip for Authors:
For those going on book tours and doing events, if you’d like you can choose to send updates about location specific news to specific locations.
Right next to the “Share” button there’s a button with the little lock symbol where you can leave so the update goes to “everyone” or click to “customize.”
Then you can choose the country, state, and even city!
You may want to let all your fans know about all your events, but there may be an instance where you are sending lots of updates out and want to save your fans from irrelevant ones!
Many authors may have multiple social media channels, such as a blog, a facebook fanpage, and goodreads account.
Make sure every social profile has links to the others.
It’s important to cross promote your social media channels!
It’s also good to occasionally remind people that you have those channels. For instance, on your facebook fanpage, you could post once every couple of weeks:
Are you on twitter? I am too…follow me here!
And link to your twitter account.
Just make sure you don’t do things like that too often.
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How often do you cross promote?
When you’re updating your Facebook Fan Page status you can include a link to buy the book on BarnesandNoble.com. Here’s how:
Step 1: Search for your book on BarnesandNoble.com. Then, open the page and click the Facebook ‘Like’ button.
Step 2: Go to your Facebook fan page (or personal page, it will work the same way). From there, enter your status. To include the B&N.com link, type @ followed by the name of your book, then, select the search.barnesandnoble.com link and press ‘Enter’:
And volia! That’s it. Finish writing your status as you would any other and post it. Now, users can be one-click away from buying your book on B&N.com through your Facebook status!
Facebook has launched a new feature, Questions! This gives Facebook Fanpages an interesting, fun new way to engage fans.
For example, on our Pixiq Photo Facebook Fanpage we ask the simple question, “We’re curious! What did you shoot first?” Within a few hours we received over 30 responses (we have 2,584 fans). Our Lark Crafts Needlearts page asked “What’s your current favorite color combo?” and received 20 responses (431 fans).
Definitely try to take advantage of this new feature by asking a simple question that will ignite your audience to respond.
Jeff Busch is the author of the soon to be published book, Zombie High Year Book ‘64. He’s built a Facebook Fanpage under “Zombie Universe,” his personal brand. Jeff uses the page to talk to his fans about what they are passionate about…ZOMBIES!
He posts great zombie related finds, from youtube videos to other zombie books to photos from the horror conventions he attends. He’s built trust with his audience that he is a passionate expert and when his book comes out he has an audience who will be excited for the product and more likely to purchase his book because of the relationship that has been formed.
Check it out here!
Great news! Does your Facebook Fanpage URL look like this?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Your-Name/189510894740
Well great news, once you have 25 fans or “likes,” you can create a beautiful, short, custom URL. (like http://www.facebook.com/yourname/)
Just go to:
http://www.facebook.com/username/ and see if the URL you want is available.
NOTE: This CANNOT be changed once it is set, so be sure you know what you want!
When you have a custom URL it looks nice when you want to link to it and is easier to tell people! There is definitely a huge advantage to having one for those and other reasons!
Here is the official link to set up a facebook fanpage. Mostly likely it is best for you to choose “Artists, Band, or Public Figure” as your category, as there is an “Author” option!
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