I’ve been experimenting with Facebook advertising, with relatively small amounts of money.
One of the surprises is just how inexpensive and precise you can be with your advertising on Facebook. You can really dig deep into demographics that aren’t possible with other forms of advertising.
I set up two campaigns, both as cost-per-click rather than cpm (cost per thousand). Both campaigns were for local businesses in Prague which are primarily targeted at the English-speaking expatriate population of Prague. Geographic targeting isn’t available at city level for the Czech Republic but that’s not particularly important, I was able to use the ‘language’ filter to target people using Facebook in English, which brings the potential audience down to just the people were interested in targeting.
Interesting lessons from using that criterion: choosing English US and English UK is essential. The default language for Facebook is American English, British English having been added later, so many people would never have switched.
The experiment was to see what the effect on the number of fans would be of going with Facebook’s default ‘Become a Fan’ advert (so targeting people who weren’t already fans). Cost per click was around under 10 cents and clicks to views was around 0.1% (therefore CPM was the almost same as the CPC).
In both cases the number of fans grew in line with the amount spent on advertising. Of course your mileage may vary, especially in terms of cost of advertising – costs for targeting to London for example were suggested by Facebook’s ad tool to be almost 5x more. The results of this experiment indicate that you can definitely increase your number of fans by advertising specifically for them, and in both of these examples, a fan costs about 40¢. It’s not possible to tell whether new fans are a result of an advert, serendipity, other promotional efforts, or network effects of people’s friends seeing someone has become a fan and signing up too, but in both cases organic growth had flatlined so the growth in numbers can be almost entirely attributed to the advertising.
To conclude; if you want more fans, just advertise. What you do to keep them thereafter is up to you.
image credit: acediscovery
