A Quick Lesson in Small Business Social Media Marketing
Advertising on facebook or Running Your Own Promotion
Which works best?
This past week our company tested two methods to increasing the number of people that “Like” us on facebook and the results were over-whelming.
Beginning on Saturday, February 26 we ran an ad on facebook promoting our business page. At the time we had 225 people that Liked us. The daily budget was set at $30 and we ran it for 4.5 days before shutting it down. $130 gave us 644,700 impressions and 80 clicks. Not a horrible CPC or CPM, but our Likes only increased to 228. That’s over $43 for every person that Liked us. Ouch!
To test whether a direct promotion to those currently following us would reap a better ROI, we began our own promotion on Friday, March 4 at 10am. The promotion was simple – We would give away two (2) $50 cash prizes once we hit 300 Likes. The prizes would go to two randomly selected people from everyone that liked us by a certain time on Monday, March 7. The results were somewhat amazing to say the least.
By noon on March 7 we had 320 people that Liked our company’s page. That is a 40% increase in Likes at a cost of $1.09 per person. Compare this to the $43 we paid for a facebook ad and it is easy to see what we will be doing next time and what we will be recommending that our clients explore.
The testing will continue and it will be interesting to see how many people hang around (we’ve actually added 2 more since the drawing), but the first round goes to good ole fashioned virtual word-of-mouth about a company that is giving away money.
It is the best $100 I ever spent.