The images above were generated with stable diffusion using the prompt 'A key in a facebook-shaped lock.'
Everybody knows that the best social media platforms are on Hive. One of my favorite things about Hive is the absence of feed manipulation. When I make a post here, I know that my followers will actually see it. Facebook, on the other hand, seems to show my posts to fewer than 5% of my followers.
As much as I hate this, and as lame as Facebook's political censorship is, I'm an author with books to sell, and Facebook promises access to a broader audience. Of course, this access isn't free. I could spend years putting great content on Facebook and never reach more than a small handful of people, because the platform's algorithms are designed to keep content like mine hidden unless I pay. So I'm trying that out.
To promote my new author page, I paid $25 to boost a post about my book One Man Embassy, featuring AI art, targeting demographics based on my market research. Six days later, here are the results that produced:
3.5k people reached seems okay, but I'm not sure how important this figure actually is. More important, in my opinion, is the relationship between this total and two metrics that I'm more concerned with: link clicks and shares. A single link click for $25 is very problematic. And 25+ shares of the promoted post adds up to about $1 per share, which seems like an outrageous price to be paying.
My promoted post did attract hundreds of likes. Over 10% of those who saw the post liked it, an outcome I'm happy with. A small handful of these also liked my author page, so that's great. After receiving 100 likes on this author page, Facebook began giving me access to better analytics:
My plan moving forward is to run a few more little book ads like this just to collect more data and tweak my demographic targeting. I like the idea of doing an all-AI campaign, but the pragmatist in my wants to alternate between AI and conventional imagery to see if there's a difference in what people respond to. In general, people respond better to photos than to cartoons, but the degree to which they're are attracted to AI imagery is not yet clear to me.
Good art draws people in, regardless of its origins. And I would be very surprised if big ad firms weren't training neural nets on vast quantities of successful pieces of advertising in hopes of generating the perfect ads for their products.
Part of me finds the whole idea of ads offensive. Fundamentally, they're an uninvited drain on cognitive resources. And yet, they're a basic component of the information system we find ourselves in. We rely on ads for their informational content. I'm trying to tell people about my books. Access to these people is owned by Facebook. So I'm making Facebook posts and paying the company to let others see these posts. I feel kind of stupid doing this, but the truth is that I'm having fun.
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