For marketers, Facebook can sometimes be mysterious. The leading social network has many moving parts including Pages, Places, Groups, and more. One of the most difficult tight ropes to balance is how to use
Facebook's paid advertising opportunities
alongside its organic, free resources like
Facebook Pages
.
Inside Facebook recently shared some interesting data from Facebook ad buying service TBG Digital. According to the post:
" By advertising to Facebook fans instead of non-fans, advertisers can reduce the acquisition cost of registrations by 44%, event signups by 33%, and purchases by 15%. "
This data was derived from a 4.1 billion ad-impression, thirteen-client test run by TBG Digital.
The post goes on to provide the following example:
" For instance, if a health care company planned on acquiring 1 million registrations over a year via Facebook ads at $10 per registration, it could save $4.4 million by advertising to its Facebook fans instead of the general Facebook population. This means if the cost of attaining enough fans from which to secure 1 million health care registrations is less than $4.4 million, the company has produced a direct return on investment on its Facebook fan acquisition strategy without even counting the value of being able to communicate directly with the fans through Page updates. "
Marketing Takeaway
In marketing -- and in life -- common sense prevails. It only stands to reason that Fans of your Facebook page who already have some familiarity with your business would be more likely to take a next step like registering or purchasing. It's an easy mistake to disregard Facebook Fans as being part of your marketing reach already and instead spend your advertising dollars trying to motivate non-fans.
The problem is that even though someone may be a fan of your business, they are still a long way away from being an actual customer. This data supports the idea that marketers should spend more of their efforts, both paid and organic, to move existing fans further along the sales cycle and convert them into leads and customers.
Have you had success advertising to existing Facebook fans?
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Margie Mintz 8:36 PM on June 13, 2011
This is eye-opening, since I was presuming the opposite, and it really does make sense to talk to people who already like you.
Thanks!
Ralph Vugts 2:38 AM on June 14, 2011
Can you please clarify the example? Are you saying advertise to your existing fan group? I can't see how that would help to grow registrations by a million unless you already had a huge fan group... Or are you saying advertise you fan page and then market to them?
Jake 11:35 AM on June 14, 2011
I am a screen reader user, and I registered on Facebook about a year and a half ago. However, I only use the Mobile Facebook site: http://m.facebook.com . This is due to the extreme lack of accessibility on the main FB site. As most of you may be aware, m.facebook.com is a somewhat trimmed-down version of their main site. I wrote a blog post about this at http://jjslist.wordpress.com . Given Facebook's enormous popularity and the enormous popularity of social networking in general, one would think these developers would feel a need to make their services a lot more screen-reader friendly. The only social-networking service I can use totally independently is Easy Chirp at http://www.easychirp.com . This is a fully-accessible, newly-created web interface to Twitter. Actually I do use the Klango twitter client too which is 100% accessible, but that's only for my personal tweets. I don't want to come off sounding like a whiner and complainer, but if more developers could learn accessibility I and others like myself would feel more included not only on a personal level but professionally as well. Having said all that, I find HubSpot to be very good in the accessibility department.
The Lit Pub 1:09 PM on June 14, 2011
Great advice . . . certainly makes sense! Thanks!
Jennifer Spencer 1:33 PM on June 14, 2011
We thought the same thing - then we did some testing and found that the majority of our Facebook fans become fans within 24 hours of opening an account (either before or after). Certainly is something to consider after running a contest that results in lots of new fans, though. Thanks for the post!
michelle carvill 4:52 AM on June 15, 2011
This fits totally with general marketing activity - run an ad to build awareness, capture that awareness (those likes) and then market to them ongoing and build your relationship, share of mind, with the ultimate goal of sales conversion. That's not rocket science, that's marketing!
Sushant 6:49 PM on June 15, 2011
Would like to get some explanation on how you defined the metric called Conversions in this analysis. Would you please clarify?
Katherine 2:22 AM on June 21, 2011
One needs to attract and convert current Facebook fans as well as new ones. I've discovered many of my personal Facebook friends don't know how to use Facebook - it's too confusing to them; also most people who like a page never like or comment ever again so the viral effect is not as great as one might think. I agree with the post but Facebook ads to get new fans should not be underestimated either