I have been reading up about how Facebook Advertising works for SMALL businesses like mine and that of my customers – Although I know Facebook is a great tool for business, is it actually worth PAYING to promote your page, to get likes and push your posts on to the people who LIKE the page? Well, basically the answer I have concluded is NO! It is a total waste of money. So keep you money and use it in more tried & tested methods of marketing.
Over the past year it also seems that Meta Tag’s on websites seem to work very little in helping promote the site and push it to the top of the search engines, probably due to the amount of websites now available, not everyone can be in the top 10 🙁
Opps, I digress, this is a post I found very useful – I will post some excerpts so you don’t have to read it all if you don’t want to 🙂
purchase Facebook Ads that persuade people to visit your page and to like it. The irony of spending money to promote our Facebook page instead of our site was not lost on us
After some experimentation I was able to create several ads that successfully generated likes on our page at costs that averaged from $0.27 to $0.57 per like. We spent some money and built up several thousand likes, all the while optimizing the campaign to better target likely customers. We justified the expense as it seemed to be analogous to building up a database of email addresses of people that wanted to learn about our site and our products. However, we shortly discovered our error.
Once we started posting on our Facebook page, we were shocked, shocked, to see that not all the users that liked our page were seeing our posts. For example, with over 6,000 likes on our page, a typical post would only be seen by fifty to several hundred people. To reiterate, only 1% to 5% of the people that liked our page saw our posts. If we were justifying our expense as analogous to building a database of emails, then it was a database that only allowed you to access a tiny, randomly selected, subset each time it was used
Facebook, of course, has a solution for this quandary. Unsurprisingly it involves paying Facebook yet again. Next to each post is a small “Promote” button which innocently suggests that for the mere sum of anywhere from $5 to $300, you can have your post reach from 500 to 50,000 people. This is equivalent to paying from $6 to $10 CPM, advertising rates typically paid for premium ad inventory, to have your post appear on the news feeds of people for whom you have already richly paid Facebook once before. Bear in mind that this is just for your post to appear fleetingly on their feed, with no guarantee that they will see it or click on it.
We have done over 20 promotions now at varying costs from $5 to $50, and the results in terms of users actions have been dismal. The effective cost per user action is over $2, and on some campaigns it can even reach $6 or $12. If we only look at “page likes” and “link clicks”, and leave out “post likes”, “post comments” and “post shares”, whose value is even more ephemeral, the cost per action goes up significantly, from $6 to $20 and in some cases $50. Compared to the alternatives, these are unreasonably expensive. Unless Facebook is charging other companies an order of magnitude less than the rates we are seeing, Facebook promotions are simply not a viable option for small businesses.
The full post is here, and I thanks the guy who wrote it for his insight.
I have read others too and they all point to the same result which is that Facebook advertising for small businesses is money thrown down the drain :/
The full post is here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/elandekel/2013/01/22/facebook-pages-are-a-bad-investment-for-small-businesses/