I am slowly
becoming more social media-savvy. It’s taken a while—I joined Facebook in June
2008, rather late compared to many of my American friends, and it’s hard to
believe that I will be coming up on four years of social interactions that have
changed my life in a very positive way for the most part. Joining Facebook
pushed me over a wall that had been of my own making; it was easier to stand on
the side of not knowing, of not reaching out, of not sharing, of being
skeptical to all of it. But I’ve realized that as long as I can maintain some
semblance of control over what, when and how I post, I can be a part of the
digital age and actually be happy. I’ve also joined Twitter, mostly in a
professional context—I enjoy tweeting about science and the little tidbits that
I come across during my day, since I follow a lot of scientific journals and
newspapers that write about science. It is an amazing daily ride through a huge
world of other twitterers who seem to love what they’re doing. I don’t post
each day; I simply don’t have the time for it. And as you have probably
surmised, I have less time these days for blogging as A New Yorker in Oslo because my work life has changed (yet again)
and now I am busy with new responsibilities that are actually quite welcome. I
plan to keep on blogging, but I may not post as often as I used to. I hope you
will keep reading in spite of the change.
In my more
recent consultant work, I have discovered the power of Facebook ads to promote
business pages, events, products, and whatever else one might dream of. For my
own creative projects, I’ve created two Facebook ads, one to promote my book Blindsided—Recognizing and Dealing with
Passive Aggressive Leadership in the Workplace; the other to promote my new
page Books by Paula M De Angelis (https://www.facebook.com/BooksbyPMDeAngelis; you would have to be a Facebook
member to connect to and ‘like’ the page). The ads appear on the sidebar of
Facebook sites. You can choose your budget—25 dollars a day for ten days, or
500 dollars lifetime budget for one particular ad campaign. It’s a pretty
amazing way to promote what you want to promote. You can choose your target
audience. In my case, I target English-speaking countries, and in both cases,
my target audience on Facebook was approximately 175,000,000 people over the
age of 18. Daunting? Oh my God, yes. I have no idea if these ads will increase
sales of my books. But whatever happens, it was worth learning about this promotion
possibility. I also use press releases to announce the publication of new
books, and they are also quite effective at getting the message out there. The
point is that being an indie author means that you do all of the promotion work
yourself. If a publishing house had released your book, they would be doing
this work for you. I don’t mind doing the legwork myself. Again, I guess
because I am a bit of a control freak, I like knowing what is going on and
having some control over how fast it all proceeds. I’ll keep you posted on the
eventual outcomes—how many people actually look at the ads, and if sales of my
books increase.
