© 2020 Shel Harrington

A common mistake writers make when we set up an author Facebook page is making it all about us. Our potential readers find posts about our writing journey, our writing successes, and our latest venture that we’d like them to tune into or buy. The problem is, they don’t know us. We’ve skipped the whole getting-to-know-each-other stage that’s so important to building trust, credibility, and a reader’s desire to continue interacting with us.

Here are three ways to improve your author Facebook page to better serve your readers:

Provide a benefit. Our readers have oodles of articles, books, and social media posts vying for their limited attention. If our Facebook page is going to stand out in all that noise, we have to be able to answer their unspoken “what’s in it for me?” with posts that provide a clear and compelling benefit to them.

Readers will enjoy and want to return to a page that motivates. Or educates. Or inspires. Or entertains. Or a combination of those incentives. Our content choice is what helps our page visitors get to know us better and discover relationship-building commonalities.

Use sharable content. It’s okay to share helpful articles and funny memes from other pages. However, if you don’t also have original content in a form that others will want to share, it’s unlikely your page will grow. By “original” I mean that you have posts that are visually attractive and have quotes, sayings, information, or other content that provides one of the benefits named above. Quotes and sayings don’t have to be original, but they do need to be properly credited.

If you’re creative and don’t mind the DIY approach, sites such as picmonkey.com and canva.com are great for creating posts—check out tutorials for how-to’s. If that is not your thing or you don’t have time to do it, enlist the aid of that creative person in your life or check out fivver.com to outsource for a reasonable cost. Remember to put your logo on each post.

Engage with authenticity. When visitors to your page leave a comment, acknowledge it. Likes are acceptable, responding with one of the other Facebook reactions goes a step further, and responding with a relevant comment personalizes their experience and confirms to the reader that you appreciate them.

Follow these three steps to draw people to your author Facebook page and keep them coming back.
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Shel Harrington is a seasoned Family Law attorney who writes and speaks about how to put her out of business by doing marriage better. (Check out her new podcast Keeping the Happy in Happily-Ever-After!) In addition to authoring numerous legal articles and being a contributor  to Write Well Sell Well, Shel blogs with humor at  Fat-Bottom-Fifties Get Fierce. She has over 400,000 followers on her smile-inducing Fat-Bottom-Fifties Get Fierce FB page.