Like
most organizations starting a Fan Page on Facebook, we focused our
initial efforts on friends and family members. The results were great.
Within a few weeks of asking staff to send invitations out to friends
we had more than 400 fans – and lots of nice feedback in the form of
postings and other feedback on our page. It was very little work and
the results were tangible.
After three weeks, the results of
our staff invitations trailed off and our sign-up curve started to
flatten. There are many creative online organizing tactics we could
have used to extend the curve, but we decided to first try some
experiments with Facebook ads.
Over a ten-day experiment, we spent $292.55 and added 120 new
fans. That’s an average of $2.44 per new fan who signed up to our page.
We used a budgeting feature that enabled us to cap our experiment to
$30 per day.
We chose to use the “pay per click” mode of
advertising rather than the “impressions” mode. That means that we paid
every time someone clicked on our ad rather than paying for people to
simply see our ad. Both are good strategies. It just depends whether
you’re trying to build awareness or build a base. In our case, our cost
per click averaged 52 cents over our total 563 clicks to our page.
Remember, though, that just because someone clicks through to your
page, doesn’t make them a fan. Only 120 of the 563 visits to our page
resulted in a new fan – that’s roughly one in five.
We ran a variety of ads in our experiment in order to test
what writing and what images worked best, and – most importantly – what
kinds of people were most likely to join us. We ran ads in different
places too. Not surprisingly, we did really well in our hometown of
Seattle and in Portland, Oregon where we have an office. We didn’t do
that well in San Francisco; quite possibly because our name
“ONE/Northwest” might not seem relevant to potential fans there.
One thing we learned in our experiment is that targeting is an
important tool for lowering the average cost per fan. Our ad in San
Francisco resulted in us paying $9.30 for each of the two fans who
joined us there. Ouch. Contrast that with an ad we ran in Seattle that
targeted hikers with some good ad copy and was backed up by an
interesting story on our page about a great project we did for
Washington Trails Association. Those ads resulted in new fans joining
our page for an average cost of $1.95 per fan. Similarly well-targeted
ads talking about sustainable farming and food led to fans joining our
page at an average $2.06 per new fan.
In sharing this
information, we’re conscious of the fact that we run the risk of
turning off some of our new fans by appearing to be too mercenary in
what we’re doing. Nothing could be further from the truth. We ran these
ads to learn how this new medium works so that we can share this
knowledge with the great social change organizations we serve. We also
ran the ads to introduce our work to a whole new set of people who
don’t already know us – and that seems to have worked.
One
important outcome from our ads is a diversification of our fan base on
Facebook. After relying on our own personal networks for outreach, 65%
of our fan base was male. Now, after just ten days of advertising, this
gender gap has closed dramatically. We started seeing some younger fans
join us, too, broadening the age-range of our supporters which is
exciting.
Facebook advertising analytic reports don’t make
other demographic data available but we’re noticing a lot more
diversity when we look across the many new faces now joining us – and
that may be one of the most rewarding and exciting outcomes of this
little experiment. Facebook ads appear to be helping us break out
beyond our own social circles and extend our appeal to whole new groups
of people we haven’t reached before.
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