Last week we jumped into the topic of social media with a discussion about selling books like wildfire. I shared an illustration about starting fires with small kindling, then adding fuel once the fire grows. This week, we’re applying this principle to social media…specifically, to Facebook.
If I was camping at Sam Rayburn Reservoir and I wanted to build a campfire, I’d look for small dry twigs, some dry pinecones, and maybe some pine straw for kindling. To apply the principle to starting a fire on Facebook, I’d look for a small group of people who regularly engage with me. (Don’t quote me on this yet, because we will qualify this statement in a moment.)
It’s easier to grow already engaged followers than ignite disengaged followers. (It takes more energy to start something than to keep something going.) That isn’t to say we’re writing off the disengaged. We’re just not building our social media strategy around them.
How to Find Kindling
To find kindling, find your already engaged fans.
This seems easy enough, right? You may already know some names of followers who regularly engage with you on Facebook. But before we label these engaged followers as good kindling for marketing books, we need to evaluate the type and quality of our engagement.
People may engage with you for different reasons. Here are several:
- For the freebies
- For the content you share
- For the community
- For the book news
Engagement is good, and growing the numbers of engaged followers is good. But your most frequent engagers may not actually buy or promote your books. Asking some questions about these engagers and the content they’re engaging with will help us to better understand the community of followers we’re growing.
- What are your top posts?
- What kind of content resonates with your community?
- What format gets the most shares? (Videos, images, etc.)
If you have a Facebook Page, you can locate this data in Insights. The analytics reporting Facebook provides is basic but helpful. There are paid services that provide more insight than Facebook Insights – and these can sometimes be easier to read and understand. If you aren’t ready to budget for that yet, use the information Facebook provides to gain a better understanding of how effective your social media posts and campaigns are performing.
Looking at your stats, what do all the likes and comments and follows do for you?
Well, maybe nothing. That’s a cold, hard truth. Social media can be much ado about nothing, especially when we don't have a blueprint for what we're trying to build. And it can suck the day’s work right out of you.
In order to know if the time is well spent, we need to have some sort of measurement. And to measure a thing, we need to predetermine our goals.
What does winning mean? What are we building?
Measuring social media for real world impact is hard. It is much easier to measure the effectiveness of a direct response ad. For example:
- You spend $25 on a digital ad.
- 4,391 people see the ad.
- 34 people click your link.
- 21 people follow through and buy your book.
- You earn $2.24 on every book you sell.
- 21 sales X $2.24 = $47.04 (Your revenue)
- Revenue minus Expenses = Profit, so 47.04 - 25.00 = 22.04.
You earned $22.04 profit after paying for the ad. You didn’t lose money, you gained. It’s a win!
But how do you measure the value of a loyal Facebook community? This isn’t as easy as 1-2-3. We can’t say:
- 1,000 Likes = 5 Book sales
- 200 Shares = 10 Book sales
It doesn’t work that way.
We’re after something meaningful but still measurable.
Something that takes into account the fact that all engagement is not equal.
Next week we’ll work on defining some goals and strategies that will allow us to tie our Facebook efforts to desirable, quantifiable results.
Are you satisfied with the Return on Investment (ROI) you're getting from social media? Or do you find it hard to measure?
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