New Facebook Author Page

So, when I dove back into social media, specifically Facebook, I guess I did it wrong. I thought I was such a smarty pants, creating a personal page that said, 'author' on it and assuming that worked best.

Yeah, not so much.

Thing is, my writing is my 'business'. I'm learning that in great detail by taking a marketing class this semester. As part of the course, I have to create a marketing plan (might have mentioned this), and I decided to focus on my writing. For one, it's a practical use of my time; I'm learning how to best market my work. For another, it's a tangible way to learn how to do this stuff and I'll be able to see real-world results. Win-win.

As part of this plan, I have to come up with strategies to improve my exposure, etc. One of the things I noted when I was doing the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis was that my original Facebook page had 237 friends - all people I knew personally, either from high school, college, work, family or my real-world social circles. This was in the earlier days of Facebook, before everyone I knew and their brother (and every business out there) was on the social network. Now, some of my original friends have hundreds of friends of their own. I hadn't intentionally sought out many of them, in part because the word 'author' was attached to my profile. I didn't want people to think the only reason I was friending them was to promote my writing, thus, making me a spammer.

That brings us to now. I decided to create a business page for my work so that anyone interested in following my writing career can do so. I have dropped 'author' from my personal profile handle and noted my maiden name (it appears parenthetical). Now, for the most part, my 'friends' will be people I know and if anyone who is just interested in my work wants to follow me, they can LIKE my author page. Of course, I'd love for every single one of my current friends to LIKE my page. Naturally. If they spread the word, even better. But this way, I can promote my work and still stay in touch with old friends. Because I realized just how much I missed that in the time I was away.

Meanwhile, I'm still on Twitter (@PKorbetAuthor) and have author pages on Goodreads and Amazon's Author Central. In the next week, I'll migrate to Google+. It's yet another suggestion in the articles I've been reading on marketing strategies for authors, and I need to work with what I've got. I'll need to be thoughtful there - my Google info has been relatively private up until now. But if I want to make this author thing successful, I need to put myself out there. After all, that's why I jumped back into the deep end of this pool in June, right?

So, come join me at my new author page, Author Patti Korbet on Facebook. I'm excited to take things into the next phase, and I hope you'll all be along for the ride!