keeping in touch

The other week we got an email from someone who wanted to sign up to our Facebook page. They had a simple question: Where was it? They’d searched high and low through Mr Zuckerberg’s creation, but Ignite Books wasn’t showing up anywhere.
Now, we’ve long been aware that Facebook don’t make life easy for small businesses – posts we make get shown to a tiny fraction of the people who’ve ‘liked’ us – in order to push us towards paying to promote our posts. What they totally fail to understand is that we’ve done an analysis of the costs and the benefits, and come to the conclusion that the costs are all ours and the benefit is all Facebook’s, so we’ve chosen to turn down this ‘opportunity’ and live with the fact that our page is, sadly, less and less useful.
This new development came as a bit of a surprise, though. We’d never anticipated that Facebook would actively prevent someone who wanted to ‘like’ our page from being able to find it. We’re not quite how that fits in with their proud boast that ‘we help you connect and share with the people in your life’, but there you go.
We hope this information explains why we don’t provide a link to the Facebook page on our website. It’s not – as the person who contacted us seemed to think – because we want to make life difficult for people who are interested in what we do, but because we’d rather direct you to other media which won’t actively stop you seeing what we post. Our Twitter account at @IgniteBooks is far more active, and we recommend you keep up with what we’re doing by following us there. Yes, we’re aware that this isn’t a perfect solution – not everyone has, or wants, a Twitter account – but in our opinion it’s a better option than Facebook. We also send out newsletters once a month or so, and you can sign up to them here: newsletter sign-up.
We’ll post a blog more obviously related to our books very soon. Honest.