Creating a Fan Base using Facebook & Twitter

Hi all,

I want to talk a bit about using Facebook and Twitter to create a fan base for you, or you’re soon-to-be-released book. I have been checking the number of visitors to this site from the beginning and I must conclude that Facebook is the best way to connect to your audience. A big advantage is of course that you only have to put it up one time to get your followers to clearly see it. With Twitter, it takes a lot more effort to get the word out if it gets out at all between all the other messages on Twitter. But Twitter has its advantages to of course because it’s a very good way to get followers and connect in a fast way with other people. With the right plugins, you can even use Facebook as your main platform to connect to people and auto-tweet messages from Facebook directly to Twitter or vice versa.

But let’s explain first how to set up your own Facebook Fan Page. You can set up multiple pages, so one for you, and others for the books you have published or want to publish. So keep that in mind when you start!

What you need to do is the following.

• • First, you need to have a Facebook account of course 🙂

• • Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and click on the Artist, Band, or Public Figure tab.

• • You will see the popup appear.

• • Click on Author in your case and type in your name where it says “Name”, and check “I agree to the Facebook Pages Terms”(after you read those of course), and hit the “Get Started” button.

• • Next window you will see three steps you can take, and in the first step, you can upload a photograph of yourself or a picture from the book.

• • In the second step, you can add friends from Facebook, or from several contact lists.

• • In the third step you can add your website, and some information about yourself or the book you want to promote.

Now your page is set up, and you can edit it any way you like, and start posting on your “Wall”. But now you are stuck with the name from your Page followed by a Dash and a lot of numbers, so how do we fix that? We just want the name of course. Luckily there is an easy way to get that right, so go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and make sure you fill in the correct name of your choosing because once it’s set, you can’t turn it back. So read the information on that page very carefully!

So how do we connect it to Twitter? That’s also very easy to do. On the right side of the top, you should see a button that says, “Edit Page”. Click that and now take a look on the left side of the page where you see a list of things you can do like edit your setting, manage Permissions, Basic Information, and so on. You should also see a link that says Resources. Click on that and the resources window will open up. On that page look for Connect with people, and below that, you should see a button that says “Link your Page to Twitter”. Click that and follow the simple instructions. Just make sure you have the right Twitter account selected 🙂

Don’t forget this works only one way, so choose what you want to share on Twitter via Facebook, so just links for example, and every time you post a link on Facebook, it will be posted on Twitter.

If you want to connect your Twitter account to Facebook, so the other way around, you need to go to https://twitter.com/settings/profile, and you should see a button almost at the bottom that says Post your Tweets to Facebook. Click that and follow the instructions. If you don’t see that button, you could go to http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/and connect it there.

That’s all there is to it 🙂

Hope you liked the post and found some use to it :).

Feel free to comment below.