We all know by now that Facebook is “Pay for Play” in Reach. Meaning if you want your posts seen by a larger audience you must pay for it to happen. While dealing with small businesses it has taught me few have massive marketing budgets like the Fortune 500 companies. So what is a small business to do?
I conducted an experiment in May with a brand that has 21,000 fans. I set up a promoted post that would have a total budget of $25. That budget would be split between two days. After the post was posted, I selected the “Boost Post” button and set it for people who like the page and their friends. The main objective was post engagement.
The results
The Reach of the post was up 1204%. The average as you can see was 850 people per post. The likes were up 620% to 460, the average is 74 and the share were up 281% to 11 up from almost 4 shares per post. The results were surprising to me given the budget. I was expecting some lift but not this much lift.
There was an update in the insights that I am unable to find at the time of the post the number of new fans gained. The insights for ads gives you a ton of information. One of the ones you should pay attention to is the percentage that saw the ad on desktop or mobile. The shift of desktop to mobile this will be very important going forward. Lastly, the metric you should check is cost per engagement. This had had a three cent cost per engagement. If you see this going up over time you may consider changing your ads.
I didn’t do an A/B test on this ad. The purpose was to see how much engagement and reach a paid post could attain. It was a success in engagement.
What does this mean: Even on a smaller budget you can get your posts seen. $25 is not a lot of money to spend on advertising. Advertising can be done weekly or even monthly. This proves you can do it on a limited budget and get some good results.
