As a new author, I tried various marketing avenues to promote my book “Tell My Dad“. I have used Facebook advertising for many years to promote a couple of websites I manage. I used Facebook ads to promote the book’s fan page. For every ad I ran, I received thousands of likes, but very few people clicked on the link to go to Amazon page. Who would “like” the page without even checking out the article/post in the ad? This was a big mystery. I had long suspected that either Facebook was committing fraud or indirectly encouraged folks who inflated the likes just for the sake of it. I am not alone. Check out the video by Veritasium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
The data presented by Derek confirmed my suspicion. After losing $100+ in Facebook ads, I cut my losses and stopped my ads in Facebook. I will write a separate post on my marketing efforts on other platforms.
In a related news, Facebook confirmed (and apologized) that it overestimated key video metric for two years. Many authors, including myself, are clueless when it comes to marketing. This kind of incidents and frauds make us lose the confidence in the system.