This is Day 10 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
While I wish Facebook Pages would start with one person and just grow to thousands of users, it’s simply not that easy. Building a fan base requires a fair amount of work and a small amount of cash. The cash is being used to purchase Facebook advertisements that will drive you new fans. If you want to approximate how much it costs for each new fan, you can essentially estimate the cost at $0.50 per fan when using Facebook advertisements. While you can rely on your natural branding ability, most companies aren’t as popular as Oprah and need to invest in expanding their reach.
There are a number of other reasons for investing in Facebook advertisements to promote your page:
- The more fans you have, the faster you grow – If you are going to get 3000 fans in 30 days, you should be willing to invest at least a couple hundred bucks. For $200 you could have 400 fans to jump start your viral growth. As I wrote on Day 5, it’s important to target influential nodes. If you combine advertising while targeting those nodes you can increase the effectiveness of your advertisements. The more times you can get your brand in front of people, the more likely they’ll turn into customers, or in this case: Facebook fans.
- Promoting your page generates brand recognition if not clicks – While many people are just looking to build clicks on their ads to convert those users into fans or eventual customers, I’d argue that the process between displaying the ad and getting the click is just as important. As I mentioned moments ago, “The more times you can get your brand in front of people, the more likely they’ll turn into customers.” I once read that it takes something like 27 times of a person seeing your brand before they actually make a purchase. Thankfully the barrier is much lower to creating a fan because the user doesn’t need to part with their money, which is traditionally the biggest hurdle for any sales person. So back to the point … generating impressions within a user’s peripheral is extremely important to converting them into a fan. While they may not know who you and haven’t heard of your brand, there’s a good chance they’ll say to themselves, “I think I’ve seen that before” and become a fan.
- You can track conversions of advertisements and start generating revenue – Tracking conversions is one of the most important components of Facebook advertising. For the purpose of this guide we are discussing advertising as it can be used for building your fan base. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t currently provide effective conversion metrics for Facebook Pages but I typically just use the following equation to determine my cost per fan:
number of fans added per day / daily spend on Facebook advertising = cost per fan
Unfortunately this model is not perfect since you will organically gain followers without investing in Facebook advertising but this is the best way to calculate the cost per fan for the time being. We will be discussing more effective ways of tracking new customers in the future which includes the integration of landing pages. I’m also expecting Facebook to begin providing more advanced metrics for tracking the effectiveness of your advertisements. - Highly effective targeting system – The best part of Facebook’s advertising system is the ability to target individuals based on a large number of variables including age, gender, location, interests, relationships status, and more. This presents a massive opportunity for marketers but unfortunately few marketers have figured out the model to master Facebook’s advertising system. I will be discussing the various ways of improving ads through techniques like “nano-targeting” in a later section but what’s important to know is that Facebook presents marketers with a huge opportunity to reach their target market. Facebook advertising is at the top of what I call the “Facebook sales funnel” and the next level down is your Facebook Page. I’ll get into more details about that soon.
Daily Task
Take some time exploring Facebook’s advertising offering. Over the next two days we will go into more detail about how to leverage Facebook advertising more effectively.
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5. By conducting A/B split testing (different ad versions for the same target group) you can also figure out quite effectively what to communicate, which topics to emphasise. That basically means that you can optimize your page communication only by knowing how do different ad copies perform.
Comment by Anej Mehadzic — August 24, 2009 @ 7:24 am
You can also stop advertising for a day or two to get a rough estimate of what your advertising vs. organic conversion rate is. If the # of new fans plummets on those days you're not running ads, well…
Comment by Amy Lightholder — August 24, 2009 @ 6:36 pm
Very informative post,with each new post i am able to build a new view about facebook features.
Comment by faceguru — August 24, 2009 @ 11:04 pm
I will be honest with you, since you are currently talking about fans. I forgot where I found your page from, but your unique and informative content got me hooked. All I know is that I didn't found through banners or ads. Perhaps it was Google, doesn't matter, I'm here ^^. Also I would like to mention the factor : mouth-to-mouth. I feel that Facebook has this factor even stronger than the internet itself. I hope to see some words on this subject.
Comment by Iliyan Petrov — August 25, 2009 @ 12:33 am
Facebook ads are a total waste. You will get lots of clicks, but very few will be from actual people, and even fewer from people interested in your product. Don't believe me? Go ahead and buy a Facebook ad, and link it to your site or Fan Page. Not only will you notice you consistently max out your pre-set spending limit, but you will also notice no significant gain in fans or website visitors. This happened to me. I thought it was weird. Then I noticed the note from Faceook saying they had discovered massive click fraud in their advertising programs, and though NO MONEY was returned, they were sorry. Oh, and good luck getting some help from Facebook. They will gladly take your money and mine your data, but the most successful social networking company in history does NOT have customer service. And why would they. They have a**-kissing websites like this one to tell the world how amazing they are, an amazing PR machine, and customers have no ability to complain or demand refunds. Instead they have a giant black hole called "info@facebook.com". Please stop promoting their horrible services, it's irresponsible and misinformed.
Comment by eljeffe503 — August 25, 2009 @ 3:23 pm
eljeffe has a point. but is also wrong. I've run ads for a few pages and have built fan bases well over 1,000 using similar techniques. we had a good brand, but didn't want to waste much cash, so our acquisitions were closer to $0.25 per fan. yes, lots of money gets wasted on fb overheads to include not serious visitors and even fraud – just like any other inet advertising. however, the fraud they identified (one time, at the beginning of '09) was credited back for us to use in future ads, so I really can't complain too much. and, yes, their support is about non-existent, and incommunicado 90% of the time. however, their site does basically "just" work. all the pages I've added up there have resulted in a massive increase of online exposure for those brands, and all on a fairly modest budget (mostly my time).
Comment by QZ — September 8, 2009 @ 4:21 pm
I agree with eljeffe. His scenario happened to me – I had a budget then overspent my budget with no results. I took my ad off within the space of 2 weeks and yeah Facebook has no customer service team what so ever.
Comment by Technoholic — December 12, 2009 @ 1:28 am
Best thing is to buy facebook fans from companies like socioniks.com .. they take care of everything!!
Comment by christie rose — July 21, 2010 @ 5:21 am