I’m sold. We have been experimenting with advertising through social media for almost a year now, and the results have been amazing. It got serious when I read an report of how a church compared a direct mail campaign with social media. They got 10 times the results for one tenth the cost.
Since, we have been doing some small advertising on Facebook. It’s easy to do, just create the event-page-group, and then select “promote with an ad.”
Here are out results from the last ad we placed: This was for a Christmas event. it was a free event, and did not require people to click through for a ticket. So we decided to pay by click, rather than impression. Our budget was a whopping $300. In the Orlando market, $300 won’t buy much of anything in traditional media. But that was what we had.
That $300 garnered 1086385 impressions. Let me put commas in there- 1,086,385. As in over 1 million. I would expect to spend thousands of dollars to get the same result in traditional media. That’s $0.00028 per impression. A little under three one thousandths of a cent. Now, your results may vary, but in our market we chose to advertise to people in the orlando area, that liked music. That’s a large number of potential views.
Here is where the beauty of social media advertising comes in. In traditional media, we have approximate numbers and general ideas of the demographics. We know certain stations and publications appeal to certain groups, but we don’t really know how many people see them, or whether they are actually our target audience or not. In social media advertising we not only know exactly how may times the ad was displayed, but we know for sure they fit into the criteria we selected for our target audience. So we can be sure that those million impressions at least had a passing interest in our event. That’s the cake.
Then there is the icing: the people who see the advertisement can say they “like” it, and tell their friends. They can easily recommend our event to their friends online. With our ad, that did not require a click to get the information, did not require anyone to purchase anything, or do anything, we went from about 5 “likes” to 341. From those we saw 46,856 social impressions. That means that 46k times people saw that their friends liked our event. Now it’s not just an ad on the side of the page, but it’s a mention the news feed that my friend likes this. That’s under seven hundredths of a cent per social impression.
Let me be clear, this was on advertisement for a specific kind of event. I don’t know if every ad we do will be this cost effective, but I can tell you that we will continue to do both traditional and social media advertising.
How did the event do? Well, it was an outside event and got rained out. The real test of advertising is results, so we never got the physical proof that our mix of traditional and social media advertising was effective. But the stats from the the social media ads were very exciting.
Scott Link Media 