Writing Update: Posting Poems on Facebook

October 1, 2019 at 5:00 am (Marketing)

Really exciting news — I have cover art for Earthbound!

But I can’t share it with you . . . yet.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share something I’ve learned recently.

I’ve been really frustrated with Facebook’s unwillingness to promote some of my poems. I set up a promotion and they accept it, but then they send me an email saying that there is too much text in the image so my promotion isn’t performing the way it should. They recommend I go edit the promotion to remove some text.

Well, it’s a poem. Removing words from an edited poem is not so easy. But Facebook doesn’t allow for such differentiation. There’s no little box to check telling them, “I’m trying to share a poem!”

I’ve looked at other poets who share on Facebook and they do tend to share short poems or excerpts. How are they delivering it to their followers or new people? Is it just because the poems are short? Are they spending a lot of money on it?

I did a little research. It turns out the number of words is not really the problem. The problem is the percentage of the image covered by text.

Facebook has, simply put, a 20% rule. They figure images that have text over more than 20% of image aren’t going to perform well and they don’t want to fill people’s feed with that.

I’ve been filling images with larger text so people can see it better. Wrong direction. In the future you’ll be seeing smaller text with a large margin.

I’ll let you know how that goes.