Here’s something for you to play with over the weekend.
One of our pro bono clients is a small but growing
non-profit yoga organization. We co-manage their Facebook page and recently decided to try out the Facebook post boost option on one of their promotions. We would like to share our
results with you so that you can see how a regular small business might also
benefit from this feature.
Here are screen-shots of our results before we explain how we
got them.
The paid reach of 9109 is the number of people who saw the
page because it was promoted. If it hadn’t been promoted, only 115 people would
have seen it.
Engagement is the number of people who have liked,
commented, shared or clicked on the post.
The results also showed you how many men versus women (and
their age groups) engaged with the post, and the country they were from. We
targeted South Africa specifically, as you can see.
You can visit the yoga retreat promotion live HERE. We’ve
pinned it to the top of the page so it gets priority view.
When I say that the yoga organization is small, I mean that
it only had 185 likes (before the post boost) – which is considered tiny in the
bigger scheme of Facebook. The organization is running a retreat in June so we
decided to promote it using the promote post option. The great thing about this
feature is that you can target your market to your area, as well as to people
with specific interests (up to 10 different interests) related to your promotion.
We did a 3-day post promo over a Thursday, Friday and Saturday
(it’s best to choose days when your target market is most likely to be using
Facebook). It cost us R50 a day. You have to use your credit card (it’s quite
safe), and only you can see the results – which we thought were quite great, considering
the investment.
The page received 9 new likes in 3 days, the post was seen by
9224 people, and shared by 6 people. This is a small niche market so these results
were impressive (well, to us anyway, based on past experience of marketing in
this sector). I’m sure that a more common market targeted to the right audience
would receive even better results. The minimum amount you can spend at a time is
R50, but you can do just a one-day promo if you want.
The only small challenge is the 20% restriction on text in
your post image. In other words, no more than 20% of your post image can
consist of text. This is to increase the visual impact of your post (to adhere
to Facebook’s new image-rich timeline design). Any text on your image should be
simple and worded to attract the immediate interest of your target market. Any
other details related to your promotion can be included in the actual post
text. What happens if you use too much text in your post image? Facebook won’t
run the promoted post, and you’ll have to try again with a new image.
Use this grid tool to check if your Facebook post image qualifies.
In our promoted post we also included a text link that takes
the ‘clicker’ to a tab on the yoga Facebook page with more information on the
retreat and a ‘click here to apply’ button. We received about 15 applications
to attend the retreat during this 3-day campaign. We’re thinking of repeating
it next week with slightly different targeted interests.
If you think about it, doing this twice a month will cost
you R300 and you’ll reach a large targeted audience, increase awareness of your product or service, plus increase the likes on
your page. You most certainly can’t print 10 000 full-colour flyers and have
them delivered to your target market for that price!
You might need to experiment a bit with your target
interests to see which get you the best results but it is well worth it for the
price, Then there’s page promotions, which are different from post boosts, but
we’ll discuss that another time.
Let us know if you try the post boost option for your Facebook
page and how it went.
Have a brilliant weekend!
Yours in small-biz greatness,
