Facebook used to be a godsend to marketers, offering a platform for brands to reach potential customers for free. Those days have been over for quite some time, but there are still good reasons to cultivate your Facebook page and followship…
No doubt. There are tons of communication channels out there and most would agree that a strong, long-term SEO strategy is the best way to go. The keyword here is ‘long-term’. Because it simply takes time to generate loads of organic traffic – and you should definitely strive for achieving that. However, sometimes you need to deliver your message here and now, and there are plenty of places to do that. The catch is that it is not for free.
Even though Facebook now charges you to target your audience, there are a few reasons why you should not simply dismiss this channel. First off, it is very cost-effective. And secondly, you can control the cost and who you target quite precisely, which is always an important aspect.
And if you are on a tight budget, Facebook does offer a lot of milage compared to most other channels. Let’s take a brief look at a campaign that we did for BassCollect.
BassCollect Case Study
At the time of writing, BassCollect is a fairly new site that is looking at building a Facebook followship, generate clicks to the website and simply get their name out there. These are different purposes, but can all be achieved through Facebook post-boosting.
First, we needed to find a very focused audience. In this case, a post linking to an article on their page about a major artist in the bass sphere was created. The bass player, Anthony Jackson, is a niche artist. And while there are several more famous players even within that niche, he has a very strong fan base that are proud to share opinions about him on the social media. This is important for 2 reasons.
1) Subjects that people are proud to endorse get more likes, comments and shares. 2) Likes, comments and shares are likely to spread to people with the same core area of interest.
Background & Campaign As mentioned, BassCollect was a fairly new site and had not previously spent a lot of budget or efforts in building their Facebook page. At the time the campaign kicked off, these were the key metrics to keep in mind:
1) 340 page likes. 2) On average, a post would reach approx. 30 people organically. 3) Campaign budget: $10.
This was the original post created for the campaign. For an Anthony Jackson fan, he would be spotted instantly.
The geographical target was exclusively within Europe, and considering that Anthony Jackson ‘only’ has some 27,000 fans on his Facebook page it might at first seem like a very narrow audience. Especially since he is an American artist and a large percentage of his following is likely to be located in North America.
Still, we decided to only target people with an interest in ‘Anthony Jackson’ in a number of European countries – and the results were amazing. Here are the key metrics for the $10 campaign:
1) Reach: 21,213 2) Post likes: 351 3) Page likes: 193 4) Shares: 51 5) Link clicks: 741
If you do a little backwards math, the key takeaway is this:
1) CPM: $0,47 2) CPC: 1.3 cents 3) 5 cents per page like
First, that is a very good CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) to a targeted niche audience. Second, the CPC (cost per click) is also very good – and looking at the Google Analytics account, the quality of the visits driven by this campaign was also quite good.
So, why the third parameter? Cost per page like. Well, even though Facebook will not automatically show everything you post to everyone who have already liked your page, the more likes your page has, the more people you can potentially reach organically without adding budget to each and every post. Further, people who choose to like your page is likely to be a core audience that you can boost into specifically if needed.
In short, these are 3 very good reasons why you should go for Facebook campaigns – especially if your budget is tight.
The ‘Secret’ to Getting Page Likes
There is actually a fairly well-kept secret to getting page likes that you might not have heard of. When your post get likes you can click on them to see a list of who engaged with your post. But more importantly, you can see whether they already like your page – and if they don’t you can invite them to like your page. Usually, the conversion rate is very good. In this specific case, 350 likes – of which 304 was from people not already connected to the page – generated 193 new page likes.
Arguably, some of the 193 new likes may have come from people simply being exposed to the post, but even with that in mind the conversion rate is amazing. Obviously, this invite process is manual, but it is worth doing.
But Does It Scale?
You may well have a considerably larger budget than $10 for a Facebook post boost. Whether it’s possible to predict if the performance of a small-scale campaign like this will scale 1:1 to any budget is hard to say. There are several factors to consider. For instance, how large is the target audience? In this case, it was not very big and I doubt a $100 post would have created a result that was 10 times better.
But if your core audience is more mainstream and your target wider geographically, chances are that you could easily scale up to a fairly large degree. If you have time, try to go easy on the first day. Measure your results and then increase the budget gradually. Keep measuring and if you begin to see less milage per dollar spent, simply decrease the budget back a bit. Advertising is flexible on Facebook and changes can be applied more or less in realtime.
Conclusion
If you are willing to spend a little on getting your message out there, you can do it right from day 1. You don’t need tens of thousands of followers on Facebook to reach a crowd. You can set up a Facebook page and an ad account in a matter of minutes. And even with zero likes you can create a post and start boosting into the segment that you want to build your page upon.
As can be seen from this case study a Facebook page with approx. 300 likes reached more than 21,000 core-interest people on Facebook for $10 – and generated more than 700 website visits, picked up almost 200 new page likes and also a handful of newsletter subscribers from a sign up form on the website.
While we can not guarantee such results every time, here are some of the things you should always keep in mind when setting up a Facebook campaign.
1) Know the target audience you want to tap into. 2) Create a post (and content on a landing page if relevant) that will resonate with this audience. 3) Target as narrowly as possible while aiming at achieving the potential reach that fits your needs. 4) Follow your campaign closely after launch and measure performance. 5) Connect by inviting people who like your post, but not your page (yet).
6) Set up a tracking URL from your post so you can measure the quality of the visits (you can do it here…).
With that in mind, good luck and have fun setting up your next Facebook campaign. And if you need help building your existing or next Facebook page, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Also, please connect on, well, Facebook 🙂
