Yesterday we discussed the trick to growing a Facebook fan base — to place the like button everywhere, get folks to like everything, as treat your fan base like an email list. Now that you have the initial set of fans, here’s where the fun begins.
Facebook has 3 types of connection targeting: users who are fans, users who aren’t fans, and friends of fans. It’s this last option that is amazing– so awesome that I’m afraid public mention of it may cause Facebook to remove it. And that’s why we keep testing, plus don’t reveal all our tips, but I digress.
Let’s consider a poker site– the National League of Poker. When we target only fans of the page, Facebook gives us an audience of 2,060 people:
The actual fan count is 2,894, but that’s because Facebook’s estimate are delayed and we’re automatically filtering by US 18+. By using the first connection targeting option, we can continue to nurture those folks who have become fans. As a marketer, you know that you want to say something different to folks who already know you versus those who don’t, right? So why is it that Facebook advertisers treat everyone the same? When you use the first connection option, you’re trying to move people from the interest stage to either desire or action. You should not be trying to generate awareness with these folks who are already fans. Note that how our messaging is quite different than “Learn how to play poker!”
If you already are a fan of the page, the like button won’t show up, by the way. It will just say “You like this ad/page”– and if you have other friends who like it, they’ll show up, too. Sometimes the unlike button shows- not sure what governs when it shows. There are so few advertisers that are sending traffic to Facebook pages and also using connection targeting that it’s hard to tell.
Finally, this is what you’ve been waiting for. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. So the 2,060 fans allow us to reach 304,800 people.
This particular example works out to 148 friends per fan. The larger the base, the smaller the number of friends per user. It’s partly that your initial users are more likely to be early adopters and have more fans in general. But it’s also that the more fans you have, the greater the chance of overlap between them, such that the unduplicated audience decreases. When you have over 500,000 fans, then your factor of reach vs fans may be only low double digits. While decreased reach may appear bad, this is actually VERY good, since it means that each time you show the ad, it’s showing MULTIPLE people below providing endorsements. Awesomeness on Facebook = maximizing PEER PRESSURE!
Consider an ad for a pizza restaurant that says they have the best pizza in town. Yawn. That’s what 99% of advertising is about– in fact, pretty much all advertising outside of Facebook is like this– we just tune it out. Now imagine the same ad, but below it, your friend says they like it. Might you trust the claim a bit more– perhaps even be more likely to drop in and order pizza the next time you drive by the place?
How do you think this may affect the CTR as well as the conversion rates?
What if we could say this to 304,800 people– showing each of them an ad that had their particular friend’s endorsement below it?
What if you got clever with your ad copy to make outrageous claims?
By the way, these are fake examples– you’ll have to see what you can get by Facebook’s ad review team. The winning psychology: if you’re doing retargeting (remarketing) on Google, then you can use similar ads in your direct fan and friends of fans (FOF) targeting. For example, if someone has abandoned their shopping cart, you can say “Hey, why didn’t you buy? Here’s 10% off now to make it worth your while!” And you can put a retargeting pixel on your Facebook page, but that’s something to discuss in a post by itself.
Now consider the reach you have when you multiply your fan base by 150 and hit each of those folks with ads that have endorsements attached. The Las Vegas metro has 606,460 people on Facebook.
UNLV has 14,151 fans of our page of their 3 Las Vegas stadiums. We can cover over 50% of Las Vegas Facebook users with an endorsed ad. Consider if you’re a dentist in a suburb of 100,000 people. You need only a fan base of 500 people to effectively dominate your town with endorsed (FOF) ads– to have more than 50% coverage of a geo-graphic area.
Now before you go crazy with FOF targeting, consider when it works and when it doesn’t:
- B2B: Nearly a complete FAIL. Why? When you do FOF targeting for an electronics manufacturer targeting design engineers, you end up targeting that design engineer’s family and friends who are decidedly NOT interested in the latest data sheets on your 16 bit transformer assemblies. For B2B, use workplace and interest targeting to hit their place of employment and title.
- Consumer products and entertainment: ABSOLUTELY! Targeting the friends of of your fans is highly likely to result in something interesting to them. Ask yourself what percentage of a user’s fans will be interested in their endorsement of a new movie, their favorite brand of soap, or whatever.
- Local: This is the goldmine of Facebook ads. People’s Facebook friends tend to be people they see and interact with in real-life. There is a high likelihood that you can leverage that fan’s recommendation broadly across their friend base. You can make it even better by adding a geographic and age filter, so you’re not showing ads to old college alumni or children, depending on what your business does. BlitzLocal has asserted that Facebook is the sleeping giant of local, because of the wealth of trusted information available and effectiveness of targeting. We don’t believe this will replace Google, but rather, augment it.
By the way, users who are being hit with this targeting aren’t aware that the advertiser is doing so– unless you are as blatant as the example I’ve provided. The ad itself doesn’t show what targeting criteria was used to match them to the ad. Note to Facebook: this would be a cool feature– and it would assuage many of the privacy concerns, where users are afraid that anything they have on their profile or interactions on Facebook is fair game for ad targeting.
There is a third targeting option, which is to exclude folks who are fans. Negation targeting matters only when your fan base is large enough that you risk showing awareness ads to folks who are fans.
TYING IT ALL TOGETHER
Few people realize that Facebook plays at all points in the conversion funnel– they simplistically believe that Facebook is just display advertising with social elements, and that Google is for conversion. It’s true that Google is primarily demand harvesting and that Facebook is more towards demand generation.
(image courtesy of Facebook)
More accurately, because you can target whether people are totally new to you, are connected to someone who does know you, or knows you– that lets you separate out your messaging and conversion paths. Most marketers are familiar with the AIDA funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). And you can see how clearly Facebook’s ad system allows you to hit people at each of these points.
Advertisers inherently understand that word of mouth has been the most powerful marketing vehicle– previously unmeasurable. These ad options on Facebook, which we’ve only superficially covered here, allow not only for the measurement of word of mouth, but the aggressive amplification of it. Social media is inherently about leveraging trust to promote your business.
Was it Mark Twain who said something like “The key to success is to be genuine…. Fake that and you have it made!” Seriously, when you have a solid brand, you get an amazing boost from advertising on Facebook– the investment you’ve made in your brand means that users are already aware of who you are, are more likely to like your page, and are more willing to endorse you– whether they know it or not.
In our next article, we’ll discuss the next phase of your Facebook campaigns– how to manage your pages effectively such that you build upon the principles we’ve discussed so far. What if your company has multiple brands and multiple products in multiple countries. Do you create one page for each combination of country, product, artist, and language? Maybe have one page per country and then separate tabs for each product, so local fans can interact? Or maybe one page per product with tabs by country? The answer is none of the above and we’ll explain why.
Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a firm specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought after speaker and author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.
Awesome post. This gives me a better idea of how to run my FB ads campaign.
Comment by Michael — June 22, 2010 @ 7:38 am
Great info… we just started experimenting with Facebook ads for our company and so far we've had nominal success within our fanbase, but when we extend our reach to "friends of friends" we experience click-through rates of 1000% plus. If we continue to incubate those relationships, I have no doubt that we will be able to convert them into sales.
Comment by Jared Brandon — June 22, 2010 @ 7:56 am
EU-SHOP
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Comment by Jiri Sram — June 22, 2010 @ 8:01 am
Awwwwwwwesome article!
And a great one two punch with the previous "growing a Facebook fan base" article.
Comment by ScottyB — June 22, 2010 @ 8:19 am
Thank you for this helpful tutorial.
What would be some examples (other than the b2b engineer one) where FOF targeting would not be a good strategy?
On a different note, If you select FOF and it turns up with an estimated reach of 3-5M (on a base of 10-20k), how would you narrow that down (or would you even want to?)?
Comment by Bruce Serven — June 22, 2010 @ 8:24 am
Very nicely written. Some real gold here.
Comment by Henry Tafolla — June 22, 2010 @ 10:55 am
This is killer tactical information, Nick!
Comment by Justin Kistner — June 22, 2010 @ 1:04 pm
Spamming your fans' friends with pitches for stuff you have no idea they'll like — what could be better? That's not really spamming at all, not like spamming unrelated newsgroups or spamming unrelated email lists or spamming comments on unrelated blogs. Right? Wait, I may need clarification on why this pernicious, amoral technique isn't spam.
Comment by Allen Varney — June 22, 2010 @ 1:08 pm
fantastic article thank you
Comment by Ian Goldsmid — June 22, 2010 @ 1:09 pm
This is great stuff.
I just changed my ads to target "friends of connections," but the estimated target size is really low. I just started my Facebook page, so I only have about 80 people so far. The estimate I am getting for the ad is "less than 20." Shouldn't it be around 10,400 (80 x 130)? I am targeting everyone in the US, over 18 who are friends of connections to my page.
Comment by Kevin — June 22, 2010 @ 5:25 pm
Love the series. I will surely try some of the tactics discussed.
What is really suprising me, as I read these articles, is the depth of the facebook advertising platform.
Keep up the good work, Dennis!
Comment by Slav Ivanov — June 22, 2010 @ 8:35 pm
Dennis – you know I know you know your stuff :_).
keep up the great posts!
-RL
PS: pls thank the BL team for the fantastic looking blog.
Comment by Ryan Lash — June 22, 2010 @ 9:19 pm
Bookmarked this article and can't wait for the next one
Comment by David Wang — June 22, 2010 @ 10:20 pm
Hi Dennis, some amazingly awesome info here!
I've got a page with about 2,000 fans and its about 6 weeks old, but when I assign the same page to the 'friends of connections' field the reach estimator keeps reading 'fewer than 20 fans'. This is obviously not right and I was wondering if you have had any similar issue.
Would love to give this strategy a go and am really frustrated that I can't at the moment!
Any help would be greatfully appreciated.
Lee
Comment by Lee — June 22, 2010 @ 10:51 pm
This is a great article. I run Whistler Club Crawls and Entertainment and we have about 1100 fans and I think it's going to be a killer way for me to market to some new connections and I love how it's an expanding market too. The more fans I get, the more people watching. So i've developed a 2 tier strategy both gaining fans and then driving fof to my website.
We'll see how it works out!
Comment by nick — June 22, 2010 @ 11:09 pm
Excellent Article! Keep it going!
Comment by Subbu Jois — June 23, 2010 @ 1:41 am
Sharing this article with colleagues…great ideas!
Comment by Kira Morehouse — June 23, 2010 @ 6:46 am
@Lee and @Kevin: The estimates provided by Facebook on counts are often significantly off. Let your traffic be the guide. Note that clicks and impressions come through on different schedules, so you have to wait to the end of the day before you can tell what the true CTR is of an ad.
@RyanLash: It's an honor to work with you and your team! We're happy to white label to your agency, plus provide quick Facebook audits for $1k– an easy way to get your foot in the door without having to hire us for a full engagement.
Comment by Dennis Yu — June 23, 2010 @ 7:24 am
Good Watch keep it up and keep us informed. Thanxs……….
Comment by Amit — June 23, 2010 @ 9:14 am
Dennis, I was thinking in a very similar way about the Facebook ads. It just simply spreads.
And your article is a must-read summary .. great
Comment by Jan Horna — June 23, 2010 @ 1:33 pm
Great article and very useful information… thanks!
Comment by Harold Heikens — June 23, 2010 @ 11:37 pm
@Bruce– besides B2B advertisers not being a good match for friend of friend targeting (FOF), anyone who is in a non-consumer niche is not a good fit. FOF targeting relies upon the likelihood that a target customer's friends are also likely to be interested in a product or service. That's why local and consumer are such great matches. Even your mom and co-workers would appreciate that you're a fan of the local shopping mall or restaurant.
@Allen– forum spam and other types of spam you mention are unwanted messages that clog up your inbox. When people advertise on Facebook, which is 3 ads on the right side– how is that different than 10 ads down the side of a Google search results page? Facebook is free because it's ad supported. Think about it.
Comment by Dennis Yu — June 24, 2010 @ 10:02 am
Think that's cool?
Think of the magic you can achieve by targeting the fans of your competitors.
hotlou
Comment by hotlou — June 25, 2010 @ 10:16 pm
Have you written the follow-up article on organizing different pages/products/etc?
Comment by Brian — June 29, 2010 @ 9:52 am
@Lee, I'm experiencing the same ‘fewer than 20 fans’ when targeting 'friends of connections’. Did you ever find a solution?
Comment by Martin — August 19, 2010 @ 5:18 am
Great article! Thank you. Very useful information that I will be suggesting to some of my clients.
http://www.coachmi.com.au
Comment by Mi Thian-De Wind — September 26, 2010 @ 9:09 pm
Who knew Facebook was so powerful! Thanks Dennis for the great info.
Comment by Lisa — October 18, 2010 @ 7:22 am
hi i have a add campaign running on facebook however we are unable to view the like button the creative itself please help urgent,
Comment by santosh — October 25, 2010 @ 5:34 am
I think that the "like" appear only when at least one of your friends already LIKEd the group page.
Comment by Stefano Fontana — October 25, 2010 @ 2:50 pm
I'm having the exact same problem. I've had amazing success building my fan base but I get the same "fewer than 20 fans" message.
Could it be that my group is too new? I've grown from basically zero fans to 4000 in about 3 days. I'm scared when I see that you still have this problem after 6 weeks.
Anybody have any suggestions?
Comment by Aaron — October 26, 2010 @ 9:52 am
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for these amazing articles and ideas.
I'm finding that your techniques work great for non-profits as well. FB is still not letting me run a campaign to FOFs but my regular ads show over 10% social ads.
Any idea how long it will take before they let me run a full FOF campaign?
Comment by Aaron — October 26, 2010 @ 9:56 am
i would also be interested in hearing why. There is some lag time between the estimated target reach and the actual amount of fans in real time, may be why.
Comment by Mike — December 3, 2010 @ 10:48 am
I am looking for the article following this… I can't find it.
Comment by Alphonse — December 8, 2010 @ 4:35 pm
Wow Dennis,
Gotta' hand it to you, you've certainly done a thorough job of telling the "whole story" here in this jam-packed info article. I'm going to link this article to my blog of website TIPS, so my visitors (and customers) will have the option of learning all you've posted here too. WOW!
Thanks,
Trish
Comment by Web Page Designer — December 17, 2010 @ 4:53 pm
Well, Allen, I just read the article myself and I can see where you may be a little lost. I think what the article is suggesting is purely word of mouth advertising, generated by your own friends on FB. You see, it's not called "spamming" when a friend says, "Hey Allen, you should check out that new Chinese food place on Main St., it's awesome!". Essentially, targeting the friends of fans is the advertising equivelent of that statement. Utilizing a person's endorsement in order to generate awareness is not spamming, in my opinion anyway.
Comment by Dave Waller — December 28, 2010 @ 10:54 pm
Good point, Dennis. In addition, wouldn't you want those ads to be from trusted businesses that your friends like and support, as opposed to random ads from random companies?
Comment by Dave Waller — December 28, 2010 @ 11:06 pm
Nice article, Dennis. My proverbial eyes have been opened to the depth of the Facebook ad. I think the concepts here are really groundbreaking in the digital marketing realm. Thanks.
Comment by Dave Waller — December 28, 2010 @ 11:12 pm
How did you get around the "less than 20". Facebook won't let me put my ad up beacuse it is too narrow.
Comment by joseph Constant — December 30, 2010 @ 7:40 pm
How does one target people when i need to target multiple interests? I have a sci-fi book so I need to target people who have an interest in BOTH reading and science fiction… but when i create an ad, it creates an ad for people who EITHER have an interest in reading OR science fiction. This does me no good! How do i target my targets? please help. dalidrama@gmail.com
Comment by david — February 5, 2011 @ 1:35 pm
Really awesome post. Along with FB campaign, that gave me some ideas on how to chalk out the complete online campaign.. thanks!
Comment by Udit — May 30, 2011 @ 7:24 am
Really interesting information for me as a newcomer to social media. Many thanks
Comment by @BarbicanPlym — June 24, 2011 @ 8:32 am
Hi; Thanks for the awesome post.
Question: How to Target Fans of your competitors or complementary businesses' Fans?
For example if I sell "Oil For Massage", then I want to Target "Fans of Massage Parlors, like Massage Envy"
Thanks for the help and support
Shawn Chhabra
Comment by Shawn Chhabra — August 7, 2011 @ 6:33 pm
Very good article, like many others in this site. Clear explanations both for noobs and more experienced FB ad users. I will most certainly use this information as reference should I start a FB campaign one day.
Comment by fibroids miracle — August 17, 2011 @ 4:50 am
[...] — regardless of whether they’d become fans — and to drive awareness among friends of fans, by leveraging social actions. That hits the very top and very bottom of the marketing funnel, but [...]
Pingback by Why Your Fans Are Meaningless Outside Of Facebook — September 8, 2011 @ 12:41 pm
It' grate to understand how increase the people! thnk's
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Comment by @hac4tmdt — October 28, 2011 @ 2:05 pm
great information, wonderful advice for me personally..
I hope for everyone can take this information
all people use facebook but basically few people now details feature of facebook.
Comment by gadget | technology — November 16, 2011 @ 8:53 am
Unfortunately the "target users who's friends are connected to" option looks like it's no longer available.
Comment by Text Messages — December 2, 2011 @ 1:23 am
great post cheers
Comment by spyros — March 1, 2012 @ 1:49 pm