In a previous post on this blog, I discussed if you should consider paid ads. The summary? Yes, if you’re ready to put in some real thought and work.

It doesn’t make sense to throw money at ads if you don’t know what you’ll get in return. Measure your success. But before you can do that, you need to define success. Sounds complicated? Read the other post first then 😉

Let’s say you’re ready to get started. You know what you want to achieve and you have found your audience to be active on Facebook. The chance of your potential audience not being active on Facebook is rather small. Which brings us to the first reason you should consider Facebook ads.

1. Large, active audience with a good fit

Apart from your one friend refusing to go on Facebook, you can find just about everyone on Facebook. If you want to reach an audience that is very active on Amazon to buy books, you can be pretty sure your audience is also active on other platforms like Facebook. It’s scarier to buy stuff online than to be on a social network, right?

2. 27 000 Lesbian Romance lovers are waiting for you

If I’d have to describe all the ways you can target your audience on Facebook, I’d have to start a separate website. So I’ll just get to the best stuff: there is a pre defined audience available for targeting called ‘Lesbian romance’. Yeah, I know. Awe-some.

All you have to do is select it in your audience settings and bam. You are targeting 27 000 lesbian romance loving women.

3. You can be picky!

You’ll probably also want to add age limitations and select women only, just to be sure. There are tons of other things you can add to your audience profile, like location and other interests (lesbian community for example).

But be careful: Facebook adds up interests. So Lesbian Romance and Lesbian Community = Lesbian Romance + Community. Not Lesbian Romance lovers who also are interested in Lesbian Community.

Update: Facebook now offers a way to combine interests, rather than just add them up! Thx for the tip, Maarten!

4. Give up one beer a day and you can be an advertiser

You don’t need a big budget to get started. The minimum budget is 1 dollar/day. And no, you don’t have to be active several days. You can stop the campaign at any time. So yeah, you can spend 1 dollar and then switch it off. But don’t expect to see much success if you do 😉

5. Really cool content to reach your 27 000 lesbian romance lovers

Facebook offers some every creative formats for ads. You can use visuals, video, a combination of both, … Try to study the ads you get on Facebook (in your timeline) to get some inspiration. Be prepared to put some work into the ad. A bad ad will cost you more and deliver less.

Et voila…

That’s it! Those are 5 reasons, explained quickly, to consider Facebook ads if you want to promote yourself as an author and/or support the sales of your book(s). But remember: always define your objective first. Next: define if and how you can measure it. Only then should you be looking into finding out more on how to get started.