I hate Facebook. I hate its algorithm, its monetisation of personal information, its intrusiveness. So, I don’t have a Facebook account (anymore). I’m on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, I have my own website and portfolios in various places. However, for the purposes of marketing, I’m starting to think that a Facebook page might be useful. I mean, half the world is on Facebook, so it seems like an opportunity missed.
So, my questions are:
(1) IS IT an opportunity missed, or can you get by without one?
(2) Can you set up/maintain a page without maintaining a personal FB account? I think you need one, but can you make it private without affecting the linked page?
[quote=“gareth.southwell, post:1, topic:644”]
(1) IS IT an opportunity missed, or can you get by without one?[/quote]
In regards to free visibility of your content and traffic to your external channels, yes, I would say so.
Getting seen has gotten much harder though over the years. Your content needs to be “engaging” to be pushed out to more people. If its not, getting fans and visibility is tricky.
Of course you can also pay to have your content shown, which in my experience is still a very good deal. You get a lot of views and conversions for very little money.
[quote=“gareth.southwell, post:1, topic:644”]
(2) Can you set up/maintain a page without maintaining a personal FB account? I think you need one, but can you make it private without affecting the linked page?[/quote]
Yeah, you can set your page so that your personal account doesn’t show up in any way at all and you don’t need to maintain that private account in any way.
Thank you, Ralf, that is exactly the answer I was looking for to (2), and I also take your point about (1). I shall hold my nose and press ahead.
By the way, your typography page looks interesting. I’m an illustrator producing book covers, so I often use typography in Photoshop. I should learn more about it - I know ‘serif’, and ‘sans serif’, and a few other bits and pieces, but that’s it!
@gareth.southwell agreed on everything you said, I was in the same boat but took the plunge and started a FB page for Unkut; https://www.facebook.com/unkut.org well worth it even though I’m still not really about it, it’s been useful.
Example from a Patreon post (photo with link) made yesterday on a page with 1800 followers. 800 organic (i.e. free) views of the ad. 860 paid views of the ad for $2,69.
So far it’s been the main thing to bring me the Patrons I have now, but I have yet to advertise directly to my Patreon page. Instead what I did was spend all of last year using Facebook ads to grow my mailing list, and using several small and large boosts and contest and pushes with other authors like me to get the word out about my work. I collected these names, sold them on some of my books and preorders, gave them free stuff, and a little over 200 of those people joined Patreon when I started offering monthly goodies, but that’s since slowed down so I think I need to switch up how I’m advertising my Patreon page to my list. I’ll be trying to advertise directly to my Patreon page later on down the road when I have more content to give
