Posts Tagged facebook ads

Tips for increasing fans on your Facebook page

March 20, 2010 at 8:06 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , , ,

I posted the following on the discussion forum of the Facebook Page of O’Mahony-Donnelly E-business a few days ago. I thought it’s also worth reproducing here.

Here’s a few of my tips on how to get more fans to your Facebook page:

1. The most important. Create fun and interesting content for your fans. This way you will get “likes” and “comments” which will appear on your fans’ status updates and you will get their friends to be aware of your page and some will “fan” you. This way you can build up your fans in a viral manner.

2. Create giveaways and prize draws on your page – again creates interest and engagement and more fans will come your way.

3. Facebook Adverts – occasionally run a Facebook ad which will appear only on your fans profile pages. this will say e.g. Aedan is a fan of PuddleDucks – Click to become a fan. This works really well if you have a giveaway at the top of your fan page. Doesn’t cost too much and is worth it. Don’t run it all the time as it will be seen too much and will become boring. It’s easy to pause and un-pause the ad.

4. Post your most interesting Facebook updates to Twitter (maybe not all of them)

5. Link to your Facebook page from your website homepage

6. Have your Facebook page link on all your email signatures.

On last point, you should not try to get more fans just for the sake of collecting and increasing numbers but you should try to only get fans that will be interested in your product or service. Quality over Quantity!

Here’s our Facebook page.

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Facebook Ads: Friends Of Connection Targeting

November 21, 2009 at 1:32 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , ,

Facebook have recently added a new way of targeting people to become a fan of your Facebook page. This is called “Friends of Connection” targeting. It means that you can create an ad that will only be displayed for Facebook users who are friends of existing fans of your page.

We have approximately 380 fans currently on the PuddleDucks fan page. Last week, I wrote a new Facebook ad requesting more users to join our page.  This is tied in with our current Facebook contest called “Name the Ducks“. This is what the ad looks like:

When setting up the ad, you now see additional criteria when selecting the ad targeting. This allows you to only show the ad to friends of the current fans of your page (as longs as you are the Admin of the page).

As well as the Friends of Connection targeting I have also filtered on our usual demographic criteria of Female and ages 28 to 45. This gives us a potential display base for the new ad of 7,120 people.

When the ad is displayed to these people, it will also be personalised. For example, say Mary Murphy is a fan of PuddleDucks. When the ad is displayed to Mary’s friends it will say “Mary Murphy is a fan of PuddleDucks” with a  “Become a Fan” prompt below.

As with all Facebook ads to get more fans to your page, you can see the stats for the number of times the ad is clicked as well as the number of new fans you get from the ad (called “Actions”).

In the stats above you can see that we’ve had 8 new fans joined as a result of the ad at a cost of almost $5. The Click through Rate is 0.11% which is low but from my experience quite reasonable for Facebook ads. Overall, an interesting and useful addition to the functionality and performance of Facebook ads.

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Using Facebook Ads to Get More Fans

August 27, 2009 at 11:43 pm · Filed under Blogging, Customer Engagement, facebook ·Tagged , , ,

We’ve been running Facebook Ads on and off for over six months now – with varying degrees of success. Overall they can be divided into two types of advertisement:

1) Ads that take people your website 2) Ads to get more fans on your Facebook fan page.

For us the latter has been the most successful. I currently running some Facebook ads to get more fans and am satisfied with the value and results we are getting.

Here’s a few tips and information if you have a Facebook Fan Page and you are thinking of advertising for more fans.

  • Make the ads compeling and give it an incentive for people to click. From trial and error I have found that mentioning your special offers and giveaways work wonders. Here’s our latest ad:

Fb as fan

  •  Select the correct demographic for the ad – this should reflect the breakdown of your customer base.
  • If you mention in the ad that you have offers and giveaways then make sure you have them viewable on the fan page at the time you are running the ad.
  • Decide how much you are prepared to pay for a new fan and see if you are hitting this over time. For example I decided that I can pay 50 US cent for a new fan. You can easily see if you are getting this by looking at the stats. When you are running  an ad to get more fans you will see Cost per Action well as Cost per Click. (when a person clicks on the ad and go to your page, they don’t all click again on the “Become a Fan” button). Cost per Action is the metric you need to keep an eye on. In the following table our Cost per Action for the lifetime of the ad works out at around 45 US cents. That’s 45 cents we are paying for each new fan – good value I think.

FB stats

In case your wondering why I belive that getting more fans on your Facebook page is a good thing for your business. It’s not just a numbers game, collecting fans for the sake of it. Your Facebook fans fall into 2 possible camps. They could be existing customers who are happy to engage with your brand and share this engagement with their Facebook friends. Or they could be Facebook users who have not yet purchased from you. In this case, I believe that there is a much higher chance of them turning into customers if they are fans on your Facebook page.

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Keeping an eye on the weather

July 9, 2009 at 1:17 am · Filed under business decisions, facebook, online advertising ·Tagged , , ,

As retailers of waterproofs, our sales are definitely affected by the weather. This is especially true during the Irish summer months. If we have a prolonged spell of wet weather our sales will generally increase. If the sun shines for a few days our sales will more than likely drop.

Managing our online advertising spend during the summer months can be an interesting task. If the weather is really nice for a few days I normally decrease the daily spend on Google Adwords – sometimes turning it off altogether for a few days of really sunny weather.

I have also been experimenting again with Facebook ads recently. I have set up a few different ads and have been turning them on and off for periods over the last few weeks depending on the day’s weather. Here’s one of them:

FBad

The tool that I find really useful in managing these ads is the Met Eireann Rainfall Radar.

The Rainfall Radar is updated every 15 minutes and shows an accurate picture of the rainfall pattern over Ireland. The colour codes show the intensity of the rainfall and it can be animated on the Met Eireann site to show the progression of the rain in the last few hours. Here are a few examples:

radar 4

It’s raining over most of the country. Decision: Turn the Facebook Ad on for the day.

radar5

It’s mostly fine throughout the country. Decision: No Facebook ads running and reduce the spend on Adwords.

The overall Met Eireann site is very easy to use and provides accurate weather information, forecasts and statistics. I am sure that they expect farmers and fishermen to use their information to decide on their course of action but they might be surprised to learn that an online retailer also makes use of their information to make important business decisions.

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Using Facebook Ads to get more Fans

April 10, 2009 at 12:51 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , , ,

We’ve experimented with Facebook Advertising campaigns a number of times over the past six months with mixed results. I’ve posted about them twice before:

1. Facebook Ads and How they Compare to Google Adwords – 31st October 2008 – blog post here

2. Latest Facebook Ads Campaign – 10th February 2009 – blog post here

The conclusion from those campaigns was that the demographic targeting was great, the number of clicks and traffic we got was good but conversions to sales were poor. The reason is that it takes a lot to persuade a Facebook user to change from Facebook engagement mode to buying mode.

This time I used a Facebook ad to direct users to our Facebook Fan page with the purpose of getting new visitors to signup as fans.  It was run to coincide with a voucher giveaway which was running on the Facebook page – to be drawn from all fans on March 31st.

Here’s what the ad looked like:

 facebook-ad3

And here’s the stats: I started the ad campaign on March 26th:

March 26th – 13 clicks – 5 New Fans

March 27th 13 clicks – 5 New Fans

March 28th – 13 clicks – 1 New Fan

March 29th – 12 clicks – 1 New Fan

March 30th – 12 clicks – 3 New Fans

March 31st – 11 clicks – 10 New Fans.

Overall: 74 clicks, 25 new fans, Total cost $15.05

facebook3

Of course not all new fans over this period can be attributed to the Facebook Ad. It’s a failing in the Facebook page insights (analytics) that they don’t show the source of the new fans i.e. whether they came from the ad, from the PuddleDucks site or from any other referrals. We did get a great referral from Damien Mulley’s blog on the 31st March which would have resulted in a number of the new fans for that day.

So overall I think it was worthwhile spend of $15. I might do it again to sign-up more fans the next time we are running a prize draw on our Facebook page.

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