I Tried a Boosted Facebook Post

 

 

Both Amazon's and Facebook's ad manager screens are needlessly complicated, and I even sat through David Gaughran's one-hour Facebook ad video tutorial. No one knows what all these sites' ad terms mean, so we end up clicking theto try to figure it out, and we still need to Google to learn if we should be choosing this mysterious option for our ad or not. I do not care for needless complications, which if the wrong choice is made can tank an ad all together. (My ads tank all on their own, thank you.)

So, yesterday when I found a Reddit suggestion regarding boosted Facebook posts, I decided to check it out. I loosely followed the OP's guidelines---I created a social media post using Canva that had a mockup of my novel and a line from one of its editorial reviews. And I added text listing the "low, low price". I did, actually, lower the book's price by a buck, for now. 

A boosted post is not a cure-all for the complicated ad manager screen, I soon learned, but it is somewhat simplified. If you've ever created a Facebook ad, you know that it's a pain in the ass. Once you create your ad copy, it wants to give you multiple view options and multiple site options. You can have a carousel or a square or a rectangle or a trapezoid or a rhombus (okay, I made the last two up); and you can choose to feature your ad on any or all of Meta's plethora of sites. Perhaps your nice ad copy gets cut off because the sizing isn't right, so you have to go back to whatever app you used the first time and modify your pretty graphic.

With a boosted post, the ad copy you created is good to go; no thousand questions or red warnings telling you the size is wrong or not enough pixels or whatever the hell...

So that part is good.

You are still presented with mysterious options, which may or may not make any difference whatsoever (no one really knows). But the big advantage with a boosted post is the targeting. Don't ask me why, but when I created a Facebook ad in the past, it never gave me any targeting choices other than gender, age, and geographic location. This time, I got to choose "interests", such as ebook readers, fiction readers, etc. I could have gone with other interests; for example, music, but I decided that would unnecessarily narrow my targeting, so in the end, I just went with a few reader types. It also offered "relationship" targeting, such as friend relationships and family; and "behaviors", which is kind of odd. To me, checking a bunch of boxes would unnecessarily complicate my ad, though.

Then, following the Reddit person's (good) advice, I chose to only run my boosted post for three days. It still came out to $68.00, but I haven't spent any money on marketing in a long while, so I took the leap.

How's my post doing, you ask? Pretty much how all my promotions have done. Day One had 1,053 displays and 886 viewers. What are viewers? It's the number of accounts that have viewed my post. This seems a bit sketchy. How does FB know if these 886 people viewed my post? Just because it was on their screens doesn't mean they actually looked at it. Is Zuckerberg now penetrating people's line of vision?

More relevant is engagement (or clicks), which, sadly, only comes out to 86. And of those 86 clicks, I reaped zero sales. You go, girl!

Can I now decisively say I've tried everything? I think, pretty much. Running From Herself is now approaching its first anniversary; i.e., its giant dumpster fire of a year.

A couple of other notes that aren't worthy of their own posts:

1. The person on X who I argued with, the one who arbitrarily rewrote my blurb, which I assumed before reading it would be a complete trashing of my novel? I'm now using it---mostly. I have to say, the guy is pretty good. Jessie Cunniffe might want to keep her eye on him. And opposed to $295.00, my new blurb cost me $0.00. He got a couple of facts wrong, but he was working from the blurb on my book page, so a few of his assumptions were incorrect, but I fixed them. I suspect this guy might be an indie publisher himself, but he uses an untraceable X moniker, so my suspicions will remain a mystery.

(He and I still disagree, and that's not gonna change. Still, the experience was a nice life lesson.)

2. Speaking of X, a woman (I assume) liked one of my posts that had absolutely nothing to do with my author life. This was my personal account; not my pen name account. Then she wrote:

"I love your book. I looked at the sample in (sic) Amazon. I'll be buying it shortly. Well done!"

Well, this came out of the blue! But it does make me wary. Why was she digging into my long-form bio (that apparently only she and Blurb Guy have ever bothered to read)? Then, after I expressed my appreciation, she asked if I had other books. Oh. I've been down this road many times on Instagram. Hey, I've got a book page on Amazon! 

I really hate being fooled. Like Blurb Guy, she also doesn't post under her name, but under some made-up handle. So, how soon will she start trying to sell me something? Whatever. I can just block her. By the way, I peeked at my sales report and nobody's bought a copy of my book since November 20 (yea; sadly). I guess I was taken aback because I wasn't trying to push my novel or anything like that. I was just posting political stuff, like always. I wasn't expecting to meet up with a publishing scammer.

Oh, and:

3. Still no magazine, and thus, no publication of my article, which was promised for the January edition. 

Everything's going great!