Online advertising (including social media) is a fairly new endeavor so it is not surprising that results are not consistent yet.

Facebook advertising has only been available to small businesses for a few years and it is constantly evolving. As a result, consistent best practices are tough to pin down without lots of testing. If you take into account budget, sector (books, sports, beauty products, whatever) goal (website clicks, conversion ads, etc.) and audience, it makes advertising on Facebook a challenge to maneuver. But not impossible.

Yes, some have reached their goals with Facebook ads, and some have not.

That doesn’t mean that Facebook advertising is a scam. It can be done correctly and successfully. Facebook’s ad platform is built on marketing best practices and if used correctly can be a good channel for supplementing book sales or building an email list.

There are many reasons why some ads fail, but I’ve found the most common one is when audience, budget, and goal do not match.

• Targeted audience is too big or too small.
• Budget is too small
• Length of the campaign is too long or short.
• Maybe you’re trying website clicks when you should be using download as a goal.

Going deep into all this is a post for another day. I just want to make the point that ad campaigns do fail…everywhere. Print, radio, TV, online, magazine, and email—all fail if done poorly, but that doesn’t mean anybody has been scammed.

Paid advertising takes some skill, so be prepared to spend time learning out how to optimize your chances of success.

(NOTE From Anne: As I’ve mentioned before, all writers would do well to add copywriting to their skill set these days. We need to learn to sell ourselves in our blurbs and ads. For more on how to write a good blurb, see Ruth Harris’s post, 8 Tips for Writing that Killer Blurb. No matter how much you spend on advertising, if the copy doesn’t sell the book, we’re wasting our money.)

The Good, The Bad, And The Really Ugly

So we’ve established that sometimes legitimate ad platforms can produce poor results when not used well. But there is a huge difference between ads that fail on legitimate platforms and platforms that are just hype.

In order to recognize the scam platforms we are looking for a couple indicators:

1. Best practices in marketing are clearly violated.

This is where your due diligence comes in. For instance, with a little research from legitimate marketing companies like HubSpot and Buffer, we can find out how to use hashtags (#tags) correctly.

HubSpot, a free source of top marketing research, reported early in 2014 that hashtags can raise the engagement of a post, sometimes by as much as 55%. People wanting to game the system then started a practice called hashtag stuffing where posts consist just of hashtags thinking they were getting peoples’ attention.

Buffer, another reliable data source, followed up Hubspot’s research seeking to find out how many hashtags were the right number.

They found that TWO were optimum and anything over two caused engagement rates to drop severely. Most people can tell innately that a tweet full of hashtags is annoying but it is nice to have research to validate that gut feeling.

(I ditto that! Tweets full of hashtags make me crazy. I’m so glad to hear they don’t even work. So people can stop that now, okay?…Anne)

If you come across a service that uses hashtag stuffing, run the other direction. One that likes to target authors is called Tweet Generator. Another is content.mo whose services I have tested.

A better option is to develop a team of ambassadors on Twitter that will help you magnify your messages. Use your loyal readers to help.

(But make sure they are actually loyal readers. Following random strangers and expecting them to do your advertising won’t sell books. But it WILL get you unfollowed…Anne)

Do the work yourself and save your money.

Also, an analysis of this company’s top 20 influencers did not produce one account that would be in the market for my books.

My $19 produced zero sales and zero new Twitter followers. Maybe I should have spent more money.

And author Stefan Edmunds purchased a five-day tweet package. Also no sales.

Scam artists know what they are doing. They are playing on people’s pain points and ignorance.

They can build fake followings completely on accounts that follow back automatically. Keep in mind that all you need to start a Twitter account is an email address. It’s an ugly, dark business. There is no verification to make sure that real people are setting up accounts. These companies abound on the internet.

Hint: if their website looks like it was put up in ten minutes and has no names of real people behind the company or an about page with contact information, beware.

2. The company uses deceptive marketing messages to fool prospective buyers.

Scamming websites often make outrageous promises about their audiences and their results. If they say they have hundreds of thousands of fans, that doesn’t mean that any of them are qualified book buyers.

Or even real people.

Buying followers is also very common (and cheap) on Twitter and many of these followers are fake accounts set up by “farms” of online workers setting up and maintaining fake accounts to service scamming websites. If they say they have 500,000 followers, look at their accounts. See who their followers are.

I ran a test with a couple different promotions just to see what kind of results I could get. The company I used boasts three different Twitter accounts with 375,000 followers.

I want to add that it is fairly easy to amass Twitter followers if you know what you are doing. For instance, this particular company is supposedly followed by LeBron James, according to the report I ran on their followers on the Social Analytics site, Simply Measured.

But the real LeBron James only follows 184 people.

So, on a whim I looked through them all. This company was not there. And, their fake LeBron James has only three million followers while the real King James has 23 million. This LeBron James page is a fake account built to fool people into following. It has been followed by millions of people who think it ‘s the real thing. At three million, it adds impressive numbers to their fake reach numbers.

If you are really interested in trying a paid Twitter promotion, try one just for authors run by someone with publishing experience. Also try searching for reviews of the company on Google.

Once you learn how to recognize the snake oil, you will save yourself a lot of grief and money.

Not all digital advertising opportunities are created equal. But the first step is being able to distinguish the legitimate offerings from the scams.

If you have a question about advertising platforms, send me an email at chris@cksyme.com. I ‘ll do my best to find you a good answer.

Chris Syme has over 20 years experience in communications and marketing and is the principal of CKSyme Media Group. She is a former university media relations professional, a frequent speaker on the national stage, and the author of two books on social media: Listen, Engage, Respond and Practice Safe Social 2.0. Her agency won the 2014 SoMe Award for Social Media Agency Of The Year. Her new book, SMART Social Media For Authors is now available. You can follow her on Twitter @cksyme.

What about you, Scriveners? Do you have any questions for Chris? Have you ever bought an advertising campaign that fizzled? Do you think it was a scam? What advice do you have for new writers who want to advertise their book on a budget? 

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