Why You Need to Pay To Play

PAYGone are the days of organic growth on Facebook. In the early 2010’s you could put up a page and once it gained momentum it would start growing. There seemed to be a tipping point where growth would happen exponentially. Now, it’s a trickle of people who will find your page and the engagement rate is even lower!

What is a business to do? The best way to grow and get more interaction on Facebook is Facebook Ads. A few months ago I went through what $25 would get you on Facebook. The results were really surprising to me. The engagement shot through the roof. The reach increased 4-5 times. Lastly, the interactions with the post gave more likes, comments and shares!

I experimented again in December with another $25 over 7 days. This may sound insane to a few dollars a day on a Facebook ad. It may sound like I was throwing money away. However, the results were the same. Every metric increased substantially across the board. One thing I didn’t really monitor before was web traffic. This time I used a Bit.ly link and where traffic was 50-100 per post this one had almost 500 clicks to the site. This was not was I was expecting.

This proves you don’t need a massive social advertising budget to be effective. I think this is one of the main reasons small businesses don’t participate in a lot of the social advertising. They see big brands spending large amounts of money and they don’t think they can compete. As I show you above, you don’t need a large budget to move the needle.

That being said If you have important things for your business, I would suggest doing a sponsored post to promote it. This will bring you new fans, new customers/readers and more interaction with your posts. What can you promote:

  • Contests/Giveaways
  • New products
  • Accomplishments
  • Drive Traffic to your site

I suggest you dive into ads and start off small. If you are new to it try a small amount around $5 and see what works. After a few ads increase the budget and experiment if all at once or spreading it out over a few days work best.

Tim is the founder of Element33. A social media agency specializing in education, management and strategy for small businesses. He comes from a traditional marketing agency but has embraced all things digital. He considers himself a marketing nerd and believes that all marketing is tied together. This means no matter what silo you are in, social, email, seach, etc, changes in one will affect the other!

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