As promised in part one of our Facebook series, today we will be discussing more about the idea of how it “pays” to advertise on Facebook.

In our first installment of “The Facebook Advantage” series, we had mentioned that although you will have to pay a sum of money, promoting your book and your page on Facebook can be beneficial.

In fact, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this form of advertising is that it’s actually a cost-effective approach when trying to specifically target people who may be interested in your book.

We’ll start by saying that there isn’t a one-size fits all approach to advertising on Facebook. In fact, there are a variety of ways to boost your promotional efforts by using this social media platform.

For instance, boosted posts, page promotion and ads are all examples of how you can promote your book on Facebook.

The first thing to remember is that, to engage in any of the advertising methods below, you must have a Facebook fan page. If you’re not sure how to create one, refer back to the previous blog post.

Now, without further ado, here’s a brief overview of the various paid promotion options on Facebook.

Boosted posts – A boost means to help, encourage, increase or improve upon something, and this definition applies directly to boosted posts on Facebook. Through this advertising option Facebook will help promote a single post to other members for a fee.

This type of advertising is both effective and a fairly inexpensive way to help your content get more exposure! The idea of a boosted post is fairly simple. First of all, every post on your Facebook page is fair game to be boosted. All that you have to do is click the Boost Post option and you can then determine the budget and adjust the settings in order to reach your target audience. (We’ll offer more on this idea in a future post!)

Page promotion – In life, a promotion indicates something positive like a job promotion. Well, a promotion in the Facebook world is no different; this feature helps you as an author target additional users who may be interested in your page.  Unlike a boosted post, where you’re paying to expand the reach of a specific post, with page promotion you’re encouraging users to take an action, such as liking your fan page. Promoting your page is pretty simple because Facebook does the bulk of the leg work. All that you have to do is click the Promote Page button that’s located directly on your personal fan page. From there Facebook will pull both the text and an image in order to make a creative ad. All that’s left for you to do is decide who you want your page to reach and how much you’re willing to spend. Just like that, you’ll have your page promoted in no time!

Facebook ads – Last but certainly not least, you can utilize Facebook ads. For this option, you’re in the driver’s seat. You create your ad; you set your content, image, audience and budget. The ball is in your court, so it’s up to you to create a powerful ad!

Though these were just brief overviews of the various forms of paid promotion on Facebook, at Dorrance Publishing, we wanted to show you that sometimes it does pay to promote your book.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks to get a more in depth look to learn more about how these forms of paid promotion on Facebook work!