Often in our process of self promotion we get creative. Sometimes we get too creative. As part of my quest to move my writer side forward, I created a totally separate Facebook account. I began posting to it and mostly I wound up using it as a news aggregator to put news articles I had curated to. But this didn’t work as I was trying to also keep up with friends and family on my personal Facebook account. The other night at a Writer’s Guild meeting the topic of Author pages came up. While I have pushed hard on Twitter, I was struggling with Facebook. It felt like a chore and sucked the fun out of Facebook for me. Not that I am sure Facebook is all that fun. But it is where a lot of people congregate, so I needed to be there.
So I created a Facebook Page for the writing side of me.
https://www.facebook.com/rwrichardson
So how do you create a Facebook page? It is easier than you might imagine.
First, go to the drop down menu and choose “Create Page”
This will take you through a Wizard type set of menus. The first one lets you select type of Page.
I selected Artis, Band or Public Figure. Fill in your details. There are guidelines for what you can have on a Facebook Page, visit this link for details. https://www.facebook.com/help/262981810477512
After clicking “Get Started” it took me to the Set Up page. Here you fill in the details about what your page is about, links to our website or twitter page, and what you want your web address to be. Basically this is what your Facebook link will be like. For mine it is https://www.facebook.com/rwrichardson
The hard question for me is was I a real celebrity or famous person. At this point, well, no. Will I be? Who knows. So if you click yes, you get an additional question about whether or not you are the official person to manage this page for the celebrity or famous person.
After clicking “Save Info” the next options are add a profile picture.
After you upload or link to a picture from a site, click Next. Then it will ask you to add yourself to your favorites. This might seem a little strange but it allows you to easily access your Page from the left side menu after you are done creating your page. This eases management.
The next page “Reach More People” will be a little bit intimidating as it is Facebook asking for money. They are basically asking do you want them to promote you and if so, are you willing to pay money. First, don’t promote your page until it is Finished. While the wizard doesn’t take you through all of the options, you will want to look at your page and make some judgement calls on security, our banner image, etc. In other words, your page isn’t ready for Prime Time until you tweak all of it to suit your needs. When you do decide to promote your page, it asks for demographic information to get an idea of your audience.
When you are done, here is your completed page. Notice at the top, it lets you know you are on your author page, so things you like while you are on your page, will be liked by your page and not by you. I have noticed some brands will like things like playing Farmville 2 that perhaps do not fit in to what their page is about. Do you want your page to tell everyone one you are playing Farmville or about your next book or blog post? My next post will be about setting those settings on your new shiny Facebook Brand page.
