BY AUTHOR AARON SIKES
I officially announced my intention to depart from Facebook about two weeks ago. As a new author, with only three publication credits to my name, this probably sounds foolhardy. Maybe it is. There’s certainly something to be said for a room with over 45 million potential readers in it. I could be ditching the very opportunity to connect with “My 1000 True Fans“. What led to my decision was the growing awareness that what could be said about that room wasn’t really all that. Or even a bag of chips, really.
Some readers may recognize a voice in this blog, and I’ll admit out of the gate that I’m attempting to borrow heavily from the maestro’s quill. A great debt of thanks is due Porter Anderson, journalist, reviewer and critic, publishing industry insider, and every author’s best friend in the known universe ever until the end of all time and space forever, amen. Porter’s Ether posts are among the most richly veined reads available to the young (in career) author.
You can get the latest from Porter at Jane Friedman’s website.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Another hat tip is owed Jane Friedman for the many useful blog posts, links, reviews, and helpful wayfinding she provides to authors. Among the more recent gems she’s shared was this little beauty.
Many people and businesses received a rude awakening when Facebook adjusted its algorithms so that only the most popular status updates would be seen by most fans of a page. If you want to reach ALL fans who’ve liked your page, you now have to start paying money.
That’s Jane telling us why Facebook is potentially a losing gamble for authors. Sure, we can like and share and signal boost til we’re blue in the face, and that may well help get status updates seen by a larger audience. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
It did until I tried to keep up with authors who live in different time zones, or whose sleep patterns didn’t match up with mine. Facebook is in real time. To keep one step ahead of the algorithm means being ready to click ‘like’ and hit the ‘share’ button as information goes up on the site. Getting to it shortly after the fact may help, or it may not. Getting to it hours later? Fugghedabout it. That status update is now buried under the avalanche of data that follows behind every other status update on Facebook.
Sharing a stale status means some people who wouldn’t have seen the original might now see it as a ‘new’ post on my page. More likely, because the algorithm will recognize it as a shared status rather than original content, it’ll just get buried again if it appears at all. And given the paucity of information Facebook shares with owners of fan pages, it’s nigh on impossible to determine how effective I’m being at getting the word out there about my projects or those of my author friends.
And that’s where it hit me.
My time is limited to 24 hours in a day, roughly 50 more years, maybe 60-70 if medical advances keep on. For now, I have to keep ROI in mind. What’s the return on my investment in time spent on Facebook? Time spent updating my author page, going to other authors’ pages and liking and sharing? Time spent manually looking those authors up because, like me, they’re new in the game and can’t command the sway of George Takei, so they don’t appear in my news feed. I have to remember to look for them.
Every time I use Facebook. And that’s on top of checking in with people I genuinely wanted to interact with, people whose lives were important to me: my family, my dear friends. Shall I go on about the distracting political posts that I only this year learned to completely ignore? Or should I mention that the only post on my page that got more than a handful of original comments (i.e., not including my replies in between), the only post that racked up more than a dozen replies from multiple friends was a politically charged comment I made about gun control in the United States. Every other post, including all of the ones I made about my writing, got a handful of likes, some as many as a dozen or more. Maybe a share or two.
In the end, I had to admit that I had no idea how many people were actually seeing my status updates. Maybe I can guess based on the number of likes or shares my writing related posts received (dismally few, did I mention?). More often, people in my friends list took the information I was sharing and used it or didn’t, if they saw it at all. But I got zero feedback as a rule. Except for those handy thumbs-up that Facebook lets me see, which are about as useful as a platter of soup sandwiches.
Send In the Clowns
I’ve shared this widely in the past, and keep it bookmarked in case I’m ever hit with the admonition to get a Facebook author page set up. Back when Facebook started to gain major traction, somewhere between 2005-2006, the majority of users were in the 35-45 age bracket, somewhat evenly spread among male and female users. The Pew Research Center this year reports that while 67% of social media users are active on Facebook,”the service is especially appealing to women, adults aged 18-29.”
That’s a bit of a shift in audience right there. I’m not disparaging the idea of reaching out to women or to adults aged 18-29. Word of mouth is word of mouth, and where it comes from isn’t as important as that it comes at all. But…
People won’t be inclined to visit Facebook when they have a specific goal or information they’re seeking. Why? Because Facebook is a soft connection tool, for people to stay in touch in a very organic way.
That’s Jane Friedman again, pointing out why having an author website is much more worthwhile than putting time in attempting to get Facebook to work for you. It isn’t a place to build an audience. It can be a place to interact with an audience, but, again, you’re stuck with a signal to noise ratio that actively aims to undermine anyone not paying for the privilege of Facebook’s so-called ‘free service.’
What I post and share on social media tends to be germane to my lifestyle. That’s the nature of socializing in general, isn’t it? Here I am, this is me. Who are you? From an author’s perspective, the more important question becomes Will you share this thing about me with your friends? And whether you agree or not, knowing that Facebook is now populated by people ten to twenty years younger than me is a fairly clear indicator that I won’t get much traction there.
I used to work on college campuses, and you could fill a stadium with the number of meaningful conversations I didn’t have with people I met. That’s not to say I didn’t meet people I could connect with, but with twenty thousand people on campus, my ten close friends were a bit of a minority.
While it’s true that their reach could, theoretically, extend to as many as several thousand people on Facebook, ask yourself this: How often do you go out of your way to tell other people to buy, read, or support a friend’s projects? Compare that to the number of posts you put up about your life, your last meal, the last funny joke you heard, the latest thing that happened that you think your friends (who weren’t there) need to know about, or the last conversation starter you came up with?
Jane Friedman, one last time:
[Facebook] is not about structured information delivery, but conversation and social engagement.
Just the Facts
62 people liked my Facebook author page within one year of my setting it up. I might have had as many as twice that if I’d ‘invited’ my friends to like the page more aggressively (actually using the ‘Invite’ feature, I mean). I put up posts on my personal page, letting people in my friends list know about the author page. I felt that was a good step for two reasons.
First off, I don’t like being pitched to, not by anybody. And I wasn’t about to pitch my stuff at my friends (I should point out that of the 153 friends I had, I knew almost 85% of them personally, IRL, outside of Facebook. The other 15% were people I had good reason to know but simply hadn’t had the chance to meet yet).
The second reason I chose to avoid the ‘Invite’ option is that I wanted to test the algorithms. People advising me to set up a Facebook fan page said I should “get Facebook working for you.” Well, this was Facebook’s chance, and it failed. If the people who did see my “I have an author page” posts had liked and shared it enough, the algorithm would have done the work of making that status update more visible to my friends list. It didn’t.
That, to me, signalled that the people in my friends list were not likely to act as “co-marketers” as I’ve heard one industry wonk refer to an author’s social media contacts. So the assumption that social media is where word of mouth happens, for authors wanting to sell books, is already proven a bit flawed if not outright false.
Cards on the Table
Mike Shatzkin, 50-year veteran of the publishing industry, put the final nail in Facebook’s coffin with the following comment:
If the spending isn’t meant to drive sales, but rather to recruit authors, call it “editorial”, not “marketing”. Don’t make the marketing people responsible for having it deliver sales results; make the editorial team responsible for having it deliver better authors or better author deals.
Following from Mike’s comment, if you’re paying Facebook to promote your posts, you can safely file that expense under “business overhead” on your tax return. But I don’t think you can honestly refer to it as a marketing expense.
When you pay Facebook to promote your posts, you’re slotting yourself into the data stream ahead of other people, and you probably think you’re engaging in marketing or advertising, both of which are legitimately useful expenses for a business, start up, upstart, or otherwise.
Now take a big step back from the computer, stand over there where you can look down on Facebook and see what’s really happening with that algorithm. It’s not working for anyone but Facebook’s shareholders, and that means the only thing it is doing is making sure people stay online with Facebook in front of their eyeballs. Paying Facebook to promote your posts isn’t paying for advertising. It’s paying for socializing where pictures of cats with funny captions trump important updates about my latest publication release date. It is socializing of a kind that reminds me of Yakov Smirnoff’s famous one-liner.
On Internets, Facebook socializes you.
Hit me with it, readers and authors of The X Community. What’s your take on Facebook as a platform builder? Does it ‘work’ for you in the way you want it to? What other social media do you use?
Aaron Sikes lives in California with his wife and co-author, Belinda. When he isn’t busy chasing after their twin daughters, he’s reading blogs, spurning social media, and writing dark fiction/fantasy. Aaron and Belinda’s short story, “His Frozen Heart”, is published in Mechanized Masterpieces: a Steampunk Anthology, to excellent reviews.