Over the course of last week I started covering the topic of creating an easily-modifiable Facebook Welcome graphic and dividing it into sections. I showed three elements of our current Facebook Welcome graphic. Element one (the top element) contained instructions for “liking” our page (since liking the page is the number one point of a Welcome page graphic). Directly underneath this top element was a graphic element devoted to our ongoing incentive, this one for a free Barnes & Noble NOOK. And to the left of that element was the third element, a vertical banner holding the graphic “together” aesthetically. That left three remaining graphics, all of which we’ll cover this week.
Outskirts Press is devoted to making 2012 an exciting year for our Facebook friends, and to that end we’re planning on doing a special event, promotion, or announcement in each month of 2012. So, in addition to incentivizing links and promoting larger giveaways, our Welcome Page is designed to allow us to mention each of those monthly “perks” as they come up. So, naturally, the next graphic we needed for our Welcome graphic was for January.
Last January, we solicited poems and short stories from our Facebook fans to compile into a Facebook anthology that we called Fandemonium (our fans voted on the title). The royalties go to The American Red Cross. The anthology was such a big success that this year we decided to do it again, so the focus of our “January” portion of our Facebook Welcome graphic is devoted toward mentioning this opportunity:
So, after seeing how the HTML tables for the Welcome graphic look in the previous posting, you can see how and where this graphic element plays a part in the entire image.
All last week, after announcing the upcoming anthology in more detail on our blog, we started receiving submissions to our wall for Fandemonium Volume 2. We opened up the submissions for one week, ending Sunday night. Not surprisingly, since we have nearly 10 times as many friends on Facebook this year, we received way more submissions, too. Now that the submissions are closed, the manuscript is being compiled from among all the submissions and we’ll continue to keep our Facebook community up-to-date. The Anthology is a fun, fast, free way that writers who are new to Outskirts Press can experience the thrill of seeing their work in a professionally-produced publication for sale throughout the Internet and available for order just about anywhere that sells books.
We don’t “do” this anthology to make money (after all, even the royalties go to The American Red Cross, which is the charity our Facebook community voted for with Fandemonium Volume 1). But, from a business perspective, it is an effective marketing exercise to build relationship with new authors. So if you’re able to create some excitement for Facebook friends, give to a worthy charity, AND market your business in a way that has a positive ROI, what’s the downside? Not much. And perhaps that’s why we’re doing a second one. Thank you to everyone who contributed!
And tomorrow we’ll talk about what we have coming in February and how that fits in to our Facebook Welcome Graphic…
President of Outskirts Press 