I recently engaged in what turned out to be an expensive experiment in Facebook advertising. In the past I’ve used Google AdWords to advertise my blog with fairly good results. Even without a good click rate I saw a measurable increase in blog traffic. Facebook has some 900 million plus users so, if you create content it’s a platform you just can’t afford to ignore. I create a Facebook Fan Page some time ago. It was pretty slow going. My blog’s content is very niche. Not a lot of my friends would be interested in the content so having a ton of them “Liking” the page would not yield the kind of interaction I was looking for from the platform.
So, I decided to run an ad campaign. I tried two different approaches at the same time. One was to create a Sponsored Story Campaign. And the second was to advertise my fan page to receive more FB likes.
- Sponsored Story
The sponsored story approach was to advertise a specific blog post from the site. I choose what I felt was the most appropriate content for FB. It was my post on my wife’s impression of iCloud. I ran the ad for 5 days at $10 a day. The FB story was seen by more than 62K Facebook users. I didn’t receive a single referral let along a FB comment from the entire campaign. 62,000 impressions and not a single click to the original content.
- Facebook Likes
The next campaign was to try to drive traffic and discussion via more likes? I had a total of 9 likes for the page prior to running the campaign. I ended two weeks later with 202 likes. However, when I looked at the profile of the users liking my page it was not my target audience. It was totally random. When I looked at what these users did for a living which should have been technology related I saw a range of things from Grand Mother to Truck Driver.
I did have a little bit more success in driving conversation on the FB page itself. I received a total of about 8 or 9 comments or story “likes” over a 1 month period.
- Conclusion
These aren’t the type of results I was hoping the gain with my $200 investment. I could have continued the “like” campaign but it seems like a really inefficient way to either drive traffic to my blog or raise my profile on FB to have another outlet for my content.
Have you experimented with FB advertising for any of your products and services? What has been the result?
