Marketing Camp

I’ve launched my marketing campaign for my latest book “The Yard Next Door” (working title), and I hit a small bump in the road and thought I’d blog about it. It took me about half a day to set up my Facebook business page (specifically for the book). I did a few things to initiate the process of making it look welcoming and to begin the engagement process:

• cover art
• profile picture
• description
• liked a bunch of pages that are relevant to my project (and also actually entertaining for me to follow, because if you don’t like what you follow, what’s the point, right?)

The next day I had a pleasant and unexpected surprise since I had not yet shared my page with anyone on my personal Facebook account. I had one organic follower (and then I told my husband, and he followed me too after doing a quick search for my book title). So, I have 2 followers and 50+ impressions, and I thought it would be great to see what my audience will eventually look like (and also, I might want to follow them back) – unfortunately, I discovered this information was unavailable. I can see the number of followers, but from the admin side it said, “You haven’t been followed by anyone yet”, and on the public view it said, “title” … “list of followers is unavailable.” See below for examples:

So, I’m thinking, ‘what the heck’ and I start Googling this issue like heck. All the suggestions out there were about changing the privacy settings, but it wasn’t very helpful – my privacy settings didn’t seem to be a problem here. The other suggestions included deleting the Facebook app and reinstalling it. I don’t use the app, so that didn’t help.

After additional searching, I found the “meta insights” area. It didn’t give me much info either except it left me with the impression that maybe, just maybe followers don’t show up until you get 100 of them (like with the “age and gender” section).

After a 3rd person followed my page, that’s when I realized that the two initial followers had their privacy settings turned on such that I wouldn’t be able to see who they are (except for my husband because I already know he’s ‘anonymously’ following me – nothing weird).

Anyway, I hope this is helpful for anyone having the same issue.