Top 10 TPC Tips to Leverage Facebook to Gain Sales

10. Find your audience:

Niche groups are all over Facebook, including book clubs. We’ve found several and contacted the president (sometimes the president’s name, website or email address is under the “Info” tab).  Also, considering SELLOUT is about the struggles of interracial dating, we’ve found many niche groups that consistently discussed—you guessed it—the struggles of interracial dating.

WHEN LOVE ISN’T ENOUGH is a multicultural tragic love story, and there are plenty of multicultural-related Facebook groups. Simply posting on the group wall or participating in group discussion has led to new readers of SELLOUT and WHEN LOVE.  We also invested in targeted Facebook ads to increase the fanbases of our fanpages.

9. Engage your audience:

James has Questions of the Days where he may start off like ”In my book Sellout…” To engage an active audience, James posts questions that generate back-and-forth discussions (talk about heated!), many of them derived from events in TPC books SELLOUT and WHEN LOVE. We will do the same for the upcoming books A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND and ONE BLOOD.

Omar posts quotes relevant to the theme of that particular page every Monday (i.e. relationship-themed for SELLOUT, True Love Themed for WHEN LOVE, etc).  Also, play around with Facebook’s new Questions feature that allows questions you create to be spread virally throughout Facebook.

New “friends” have hit us up on Facebook IM chat, asking about our books. We send them a link and within minutes later, get something in the TPC inbox saying they bought the book. Often times they reply with a message, “Okay, I just bought it!”

8. Don’t leave out friends and family:

Your family/friends are your biggest supporters, so they usually won’t hesitate to mention your book on their page. James has a cousin who uses the cover of SELLOUT as his profile picture!

We typically give a limited-time offer just to our friends on Facebook to make it easy for them to support us and get our book launches off to a solid start.

Many times we would stumble on our friends’ updates, having no idea they mentioned a TPC book. Here’s a tip: You can find out if anyone mentioned your book simply by typing the title in the search box. If any of your friends mentioned the book’s title (i.e., “Sellout” or “When Love”), it will show.

7.  Give people the behind the scenes:

James recently won a Best New Author Award and posted the announcement on his page, but the organizer of the festival also announced it on her festival “like” page. It’s hard to determine exactly how many books we sold based on the organizer’s announcement, but considering their page has 3,000 likes—also the 3,000 or so friends total of each TPC member’s page—that’s excellent exposure!

6. Leverage the power of interactive promotion (photo/video/audio):

Facebook automatically integrates with Flickr, youtube, audible and a host of other platforms, in addition to its own very useful tools.

We regularly post pics of people holding the books, including book clubs and two of the models on the SELLOUT cover. Having a picture of your book in someone’s hands is powerful imagery and can make a curious potential reader wonder what the fuss is about. Models on the book cover can be promoters, too (to see some of the pictures, visit our Facebook pages or click the “TPC Flickr” tab). Think about it: The model is probably as excited being on the book cover as the author is being the author of the book. That means the models help spread the world to their family/friends. It’s a win-win. The coolest thing is seeing ALL members of a book club holding our books, sometimes about ten of them.

James posts all his various radio interviews on Facebook and Omar and Steph create viral videos and commercials that are spread all over the site as well.  All we need is a Mac and iMovie!

5.  Make sure your book cover is the profile pic for your page:

We’ve posted digital covers of our books and on the Comments section, and people have said things like, “I gotta get this book! Where do I get it?” Once we see comments asking where to find our books, we’re on it! We normally post a link directly to an autographed copy, if that’s what they want.

4.  Link-in:

Remember the worldwide web is built on outbound and inbound links.  We have created author profiles off Facebook for SELLOUT and WHEN LOVE in every imaginable place online with links leading people back to our various websites and Facebook. Integrating the Facebook Like and Share buttons onto these pages help people quickly join your fanpages or send that information to someone they think may be interested as well.

We’ve also made announcements that led people to our site and buying our books. Whether it be a new blog, lower price-point, award or new link, they’ve always served as bread crumbs leading back to our website and, in some cases, a sale.

3. Be Friend-Worthy:

People are not on your Facebook page to buy anything.  They’re on Facebook daring you to post content worthy of their time and expression.  They are there to silently cheer you on from the sidelines. Take the time to thank people for joining your page.  If they friend your page, friend them with your Facebook profile and treat them like a friend.  Don’t make it one way. Post comments on their pages as well and they will return time and time again.

2. Activate Your Audience:

This is one of the hardest things to do on Facebook because of the reasons mentioned above, so we’ve created all kinds of contests (Amazon certificate, free autographed copies, best book cover, best book blurb, etc). Several of these contests have led to hundreds of website hits, with many visitors voting, then browsing the TPC website. Browsing has led to sales.  At worst, the promotions have led to viral sharing of our fanpages thus increasing awareness of our various brands.

1.  Make it EASY to Buy your Book:

We created tabs where anyone can buy books directly from our Facebook fan pages. Why not make it easy for your friends to buy your book right off your page? Aren’t they on Facebook all day anyway?  You can change your wall settings to make your buy page the default landing page for your property as well.  This makes the friend to fan to true fan transition easier than ever.