Facebook Author Page: Why You Don’t Want Some People to Like Your Facebook Page

A large number of authors rely on Facebook pages as their primary author platform, and yet I couldn’t find on the entire internet a single post which would highlight this issue which is such an important consideration for your Facebook Author Page.

There are some followers and “likers” you must get rid of, right now! In this post I examine the reasons for suggesting this drastic action which can have a huge impact on your book marketing efforts.

This post is not about ghost followers, fake people or bots who end up tailing you on the blog universe. It is also not about toxic Facebook followers who revel in leaving mean comments on your posts.

It is about real nice people who follow you, comment on your posts and they love your posts. Yet, many people want to get rid of some of these followers. Why?

I will tell you a story which would help you understand the rationale for firing some of your nice subscribers.

I got the inspiration for this post from my friend Marilyn’s story. Marilyn is an author and a music teacher. She has written Piano song books and also other helpful books such as Piano Keyboard & Note Charts. In the summer of 2008, when Facebook pages were skyrocketing in popularity, Marilyn created a Facebook page for her home-based Piano teaching course for young kids. This page also served to promote her song books. She started promoting her Facebook page everywhere and also bought Facebook ads to get more page likes.

So far so good.

Marilyn goofed up a bit in creating the ads.

In creating her Facebook ads, Marilyn did not use any other filter criteria to target her ads.

Soon, Marilyn’s page collected thousands of page likes. All people who knew her or saw her ads “liked” her page to show their support. She had her page liked by people who were 90 years old, to kids who were barely 10 years old, from all geographies, demographics, income groups and educational backgrounds. As you can imagine most of these people had no intention to join Marilyn’s music course, or enrolling their kids in her classes, and had “liked” her page only to be nice to her. Many of the page likes were from people in India, China and other countries who certainly would not travel to Austin, Marilyn’s hometown, to get Piano lessons for their kids, or buy her song books.

To add to Marilyn’s woes, one fine day Facebook decided to change their page viewing algorithm.

During the early days of Facebook pages, whenever you published a post on your page, it got shown to everyone who had liked your page. Very soon however, Facebook changed their algorithm so that your new posts got shown only to a small percentage, typically 4 to 5 percent of the people who had liked your page. This percentage constantly varies depending on some undisclosed Facebook algorithm, however, generally speaking 20% is the upper limit.

That is when the problem started for Marilyn.

Whenever Marilyn published announcements about promotions or exciting news about her music classes, it got shown to a small percentage of people who had liked her page. Facebook randomly selected these people, from those who had liked the page – however most of them had no interest whatsoever in music.

Every time Marilyn published a post, the large number of uninterested people who viewed her page, crowded out the few musically inclined people.

Her posts rarely got shown to those people who could have been her potential customers.

What were Marilyn’s option?

By then, Facebook had started another service which allows you to boost your page to a larger number of your page followers. Marilyn didn’t like this option. Marilyn felt that she had already spent thousands of dollars in collecting page likes through paid ads, and it didn’t make sense for her to constantly be on the hook to spend additional money just to get her page posts viewed by the right people. She wished that even without the booster ads, the organic act of publishing her post should reach at-least a few prospective customers – but since her page was saturated with completely irrelevant audience, her Facebook page was proving to be practically useless for her.

Marilyn could make her page visible only to a certain audience, excluding foreign countries. But this would make her page no longer publicly available, as Facebook would require people to sign in first, so it could apply the filtering. If Marilyn chose to make her page not publicly available, she would lose a lot of SEO juice. Her name and music classes would lose their Google page rankings as the page would be hidden from unauthenticated, guest visitors.

So, Marilyn did the only thing which made sense. She started another Facebook page and promoted it to a very specific audience – people in her hometown, who had interest in Music, and had a certain income so they can afford music lessons. She made sure that she promoted her page only to women in a certain age group who were expected to have young kids.

Eventually, Marilyn managed to grow her Facebook likes for her new page to a respectable number. This was a much smaller number than the previous page. But unlike the previous page which was swollen with completely indifferent people, the new page was full of prospective customers interested in music and looking for music lessons and song books for their children.

The new page brought huge benefits for Marilyn as her posts started reaching the right people. Very soon Marilyn was able to grow her course to a point that she could open a Piano school for kids and hired several of her former students as teachers.

Facebook Author Page: In Conclusion

A large percentage of self-published authors use Facebook as their Author Page. I hope this post bring your best practices to make your Facebook presence more effective. Even though the post is meant to be about “Facebook Author Page,” the ideas discussed in this post are equally meaningful for artists, entrepreneurs, bloggers and just about anyone who uses Facebook pages.

Having millions of followers, subscribers or likes on your social media pages, YouTube channels or Facebook pages may feel exhilarating. However, if you are looking for something more than mere bragging rights, you need to make sure that the people you are attracting to your social media channels are the right people.