Facebook now has more than one billion active monthly users and if it were a country it would be the third largest in the world. The sheer number of people that use this social website is mind boggling and any author would pay an arm and a leg to sell just one book to every person using the website. However, authors should avoid getting ahead of themselves and building castles in the air. That being said, there are several ways you can use the site to promote your books.

Setting up a personal profile

This is the first step towards making new friends that can help you promote your books or even buy the book themselves. The process of setting up an account is easy, but the hard task is to make friends; not just any type of friends but those that can help you with your book. If you want to really take advantage of the promotional capabilities of Facebook, you should create a page for your books.

Set up a group

There are so many aspects of Facebook that sometimes it might be difficult to know which ones to use and which ones to ignore. For example, groups in Facebook help you to socialize with many people who share your interests. You can create a group where you can invite fellow authors to join or set up a group to meet your audience. Groups are not designed for promoting items but they are great for networking with fellow authors and your audience.

Create a page

A page is a better tool if you want to use Facebook to promote your book. A page can be found by anyone on the Internet whether or not he has a Facebook account. People don’t have to log in first to see your page hence it is a great tool if you are more interested in marketing your book. Pages have many tools that authors can use to promote their books. For instance, you can customize your page with covers of your books, include as many links as you want to, such as your blog and author website, and you can even analyze how people are interacting with the various elements of your page.

Advertising on Facebook

People’s profiles on Facebook have a lot more information than you can get from any web search. This is why Facebook is a great place to advertise your book. An advert on the website can be targeted at very specific audiences. For instance, you can advertise to young women aged 20-35 who like reading science fiction. On Facebook you can also search for people using certain descriptions and you will be given the statistics on how many people fit your criteria. You can use this information to decide whether to advertise to that audience or whether you would like to advertise to a different audience. All you have to do is to change the criteria that you use to select your target audience.

Search for like minded people

There are tools on Facebook that you can use to search for people based on what they are discussing. When you find them you can connect with them and find out whether they would like to join the discussion about your books and other works.