How Booksellers Can Use Facebook
There has been much buzz about Facebook lately because of their redesign. And if you want to spend the time setting up a Facebook page for your store, these changes are very beneficial.
First, a few basics:
Who uses Facebook?
From the official Facebook stats page,
- More than 175 million active users
- More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
- The fastest growing demographic is those 30 years old and older
You likely have very many customers who are on Facebook. Both my mother and my mother-in-law have joined recently. It is definitely becoming mainstream.
What is the difference between a “profile” and a “page”?
A profile is for an individual person. Any entity that is not an individual is prohibited by Facebook from having a profile. Instead, your store, club, nonprofit, or other organization should have a Facebook page. Pages and Profiles used to be very different, and to be honest, pages were not all that great. Now, however, with the new changes rolled out last week, pages function very much like profiles, with one major exception: You don’t have to be a Facebook member to view pages; they can be seen by the outside world, (which means they can also be seen by Google).
So how can a bookseller use Facebook?
Facebook pages mean that if you don’t want to set up a full blog, you can get some of the benefits by using your Facebook page as a mini-blog.
Once you’ve set up a Facebook page, other Facebook members can become a “fan” of your page. Fans are very powerful. Every time you post a status update, it will appear on your fans’ pages. In addition, when someone becomes a fan of your page, it is broadcast to their friends, with a link to your page. Curious friends may follow that link to learn more about you, since you’ve been identified as someone that their friend supports.
Facebook advertising is very, very powerful in terms of targeting. Similar to Google’s Pay Per Click, you can set a modest budget per day. You can choose to show your ad only to those who meet certain criteria: live in your city, are college graduates, and have “books” in their profile, for instance. When you create these ads, the Facebook ad tool will show you how many Facebook members meet those criteria. You pay only when someone clicks through to your website or Facebook page.
Both status updates and Facebook ads mean that Facebook might be a great way to get word out about events in your store. If you are having an author with general interest, a status update will announce it to your fans. But if you have a specialized event, like a science fiction author, you can do a targeted ad that will reach beyond your page’s fans and into the general Facebook population. You can target several nearby cities, people who have sci-fi in their profile, or who list similar authors as favorites in their profile.
Use Facebook to develop Community
Facebook pages have a built-in discussion board, that you can use as a way to talk with your page’s fans. Vroman’s is currently experimenting with an online book discussion using their Facebook page. (click on the tab labeled “boxes” — they have not yet activated their Discussions tab as of this writing).
Of course there are caveats:
The new Facebook redesign has also improved members’ abilities to filter what updates they see. As a result, people can choose not to see your updates. And while your Facebook page is visible to the outside world, non-Facebook members will not be able to interact with your page; they can only read it.
More importantly, having a page on Facebook is a commitment. You must keep it updated, and you must monitor it for potential customer service requests. If a customer leaves you a question, or a message about an issue, they are going to expect you to respond in a timely fashion. The response, “oh, we never check our Facebook page, you should have emailed us,” is just not acceptable.
For more information:
Marketing agency The Advance Guard has a fantastic white paper on setting up and using the new Facebook pages. Be sure to click through some of the sidebar examples to see how other businesses are using their pages.
Middlebury College Bookstore was one of the earliest booksellers to use Facebook fan pages. You can read about some of their results here, and read their white paper that they presented at CAMEX in 2008 (opens in a .pdf file).
Does your store have a Facebook page?
If so, I’d love to hear your experiences, both good and bad. Is it a good use of your time? How have you used it?
Jeff Waxman says:
March 17th, 2009 at 10:08 am
We’ve been using Facebook to promote our events for six months or so and, despite the option they offer to narrow their notifications to a target demographic, I’ve found that doing our own targeting (ie: only doing special notifications with specific events with a wide appeal) is more obviously helpful.
Updating our events calendar is quite easy and much of a time-drain and it’s nice to be able to reach out to 1000 “fans” or so we’ve collected–even if they’re not all exactly local.
Ann Kingman says:
March 17th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Thanks, Jeff. Have you seen any direct results yet? Wondering if customers mention that they learn about events from your FB page?
I did just learn that Facebook has started doing radius targeting for ads, so you can target people within a 10, 25, or 50 mile radius of a selected city. That feature is not yet available for non-paid messages.
Patrick says:
March 17th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Our page now has “Discussions” enabled. Thanks for pointing that out, Ann, and thanks for the shout-out about our book club!
Jenn says:
March 17th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Thanks so much for the white paper — we have a page, and I’ve been trying to figure out the implications of the new format, so this is just perfect! Currently, our page is pretty low maintenance — I’ve got it hooked up to our blog, so that each post goes in as a Note, to keep content fresh and coming. It took a little while for the page to get going, but then all of a sudden it took off and now we’ve got 300+ fans. We’ve used updates for alerting fans to sales, thus far; am still contemplating how best to utilize this addition to our interwebs arsenal.
Suzanna says:
March 17th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
We’ve been on Facebook for a while, and mostly use it to list our events and post photos. I’d say it’s worth it – we have over 125 fans so far. It’s nice to see how many people love your store enough to say they’re a “fan.” It takes very minimal work to maintain.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Oblong-Books-Music/9676149009?ref=mf
Patrick says:
March 18th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Just wanted to add that most people have pages “auto-ignored” in their status feeds. I think this is the default for Facebook. I sent out an update to all our fans asking them to enable us. Otherwise, they won’t see your status updates.
Ann Kingman says:
March 18th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Patrick, thank you, I wasn’t aware of that. I’ll have to go check our Books on the Nightstand page as well — great tip!
David E says:
March 19th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
I’ve recently started both a page for the bookstore where I work (Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis) and a group for a science book club we’ve just launched. Neither is at all active–though it’s only been a few weeks.
We haven’t seen much impact from Facebook. We did have an author in for a reading, and it was obvious she uses Facebook to network with readers. People RSVP’d to the event listing on our page, so that got our name out. I’m not sure the turnout was any better than non-Facebook-ing authors, but it was good to see nonetheless.
I also created a Facebook gift application that lets people give “Stuff from Magers & Quinn Booksellers.” I’ve approached a few publishers about making forthcoming titles into Facebook gifts. We’ve had one so far, “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” from Quirk Books. The gift was sent about three hundred times in a few days, then died. Oh well.
David E
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
Ann Kingman says:
March 19th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
David, I’m intrigued by the Facebook gift thing. Excellent idea, and even if you didn’t get what you wanted from it, I applaud your creative idea!
I think the new Facebook design has thrown people for a loop. As Patrick pointed out, page updates won’t show up on your fans’ pages unless they turn them on. Things like that will take some time to get people educated about the changes. As we all figure out how to use pages to their best advantage, I think there will be more data to evaluate over time.
Thanks for your comment!
david e says:
March 20th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
My big gripe with Facebook at the moment is that they refuse to automatically import the store’s blog onto our page. It’s set up properly, as far as I can tell, but nothing. It worked until the transition to the new layout, then stopped.
There’s a notice when you set up the importing that if you have “too many” items, they will not import a blog. I think that’s happened to us.
I wrote Facebook, but have gotten no answer. If anyone has suggestions, I’d be grateful.
David E
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
Table of Contents; My Favorite Posts From the Last Week « Brews and Books says:
March 21st, 2009 at 9:30 am
[...] It ain’t all tweets and blogs – this week, Bookseller’s Blog covered how booksellers can use Facebook to develop community and target [...]
Ann Kingman says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:20 am
David, are you using the “Notes” feature to import your blog? We had that set up on the Books on the Nightstand page, but it hasn’t updated after the past few posts. I’m playing around, trying to figure it out.
david e says:
March 24th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Yes, I used the Notes for importing. It worked pretty well for about three weeks, then nothing. I went through all the same steps and everything seemed fine, but still nothing. FB says it’s set up to import our notes, but it just doesn’t.
Patrick says:
March 24th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I had been importing our blog as well, but it stopped right around the time of the Facebook re-design. My guess is that this feature isn’t currently functioning. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.
CJ West says:
March 26th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
I can attest that many adult readers are on Facebook and Myspace. In the last year and a half I have connected with thousands of readers and I have been surprised by the demographics, especially on Facebook. The Facebook crowd tends to be older, professional and more apt to read for leisure.