Today I want to talk about something that’s popped up on Facebook Of course, everybody knows Facebook world’s like a social network with like hundred billion people, must a hundred million people online.
So it’s a great place to connect to people. For those who haven’t, you simply pop in your name, your email address and password. Make sure you’re old enough, because they want people over the age of 13. You sign up and you’re ready to go. Most people are already logged in.
Here in this case is my I guess dashboard page where this thing normally winds up that has a whole bunch of different stuff going on. On the left-hand side, lots of options and menus. In the middle is my newsfeed, which is all sorts of things that my friends are up to Sponsored posts over here on the right In fact, let’s focus on those just for a moment.
Oh, and on the very far right, people who are online now in case I want to chat to them. Let’s look at this thing he calls sponsored advertising here I’ve had a personal problem with this I’ve never found out a way to do really well with this. Firstly, it’s what’s called pay per click, which means for every click someone makes, you actually pay Facebook some money.
And, while they have a terrific system that allows you to budget that and be very focused, I always wind up paying too much for my clicks in such a way that I don’t feel good about it. Also what I’ve noticed is it’s quite hard to generate traffic using the small amount of space you’ve got. Look at that It’s very small, small number of words, small image, and someone told me, in confidence, that the only thing that clicks is pictures of women’s breasts, which is not really what I want to associate with my business. So what’s this new way of generating traffic to your posts? As you know, when you post something here, for example, I might say, “Happy Monday morning, everyone” that particular post, depending on who’s around right now, will pop into the Facebook system and start showing up on other people’s pages.
However, if you see how many friends I’ve got, which is 74,000, and how many posts they make at any one time, the chances of that post getting in front of that many people is pretty low until this sneaky button showed up quite recently. This is the promote button and when you click it, it starts saying, “Would you like to promote this post?” In this case, I could pay $7 US and Facebook would start bringing that post to the top of other people’s screens. That’s very handy because you can get thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people to see your post this way for 7 bucks, which is as much as I was paying for expensive clicks before, or certainly 2 or 3. I’m gonna cancel this ‘cause I don’t want to promote that particular post, but I’m gonna show you a post I promoted before. In this case I’m gonna go to my page.
I have a fan page I have been promoting posts in the last little while. Straight away you can see that it’s actually tracking some of these posts for me. You can see here it was a post I promoted for my book “The Google Gamble,” which got 49,000 people. This one was a shout out to my friend Greg Reid that got to 34,000 people. So let’s have a little bit of a look at the detail of how that works.
Firstly, a post is a post is a post and all you need to do is click on the little piece underneath it that says “Promote” or “Boost Post” in this case. And it’ll say to you, “Who do you want to boost your post to?” I want to boost this post to my page in the friends or the people. I choose to do another level of targeting, such as which city they’re in or what age they are or men or women or certain keyword searchable interests. And then it gives me a budget. So in this case, it’s telling me that if I put $40 against this post, I would get to somewhere between 22,000 to 58,000 people of 2 million who they believe are available. Not bad, hey? Well, let me look at a post that we did before.
This one happens to be for my book “The Google Gamble” where I want to just promote that I had a recent, in this case, a recent review that was very positive and I wanted people to know about it in case they were interested. And I just linked it straight to “The Google Gamble” page, which is on my website, which you can see here, “The Google Gamble”. That’s the page I’m linking to, which is outside the Facebook ecosystem and allows people to buy copies of paperback or Kindle versions for 10 or 15 bucks a pop. So how did that work? Well, when I had this boost, you can see here that what I spent was $20. Not a lot.
And I got to 48,000 people, which is kind of amazing And how many clicks did I get? Well, in this case, one person clicked on the photo, which was just a picture of the cover I had 65 people actually go to my page on my website. And I had 13 people like that post. So that in turn sort of promotes that post to their own friends.
You can see I got 13 page likes, which means they now joined my group forever and 119 people who liked just that post. So that was a pretty huge payout for a $20 spend. Let’s look at one more. This was from my friend Greg. He was promoting a book and I wanted to help him out.
You can see here this is his Napolean book, titled Stickability. In this case you can see the stats I spent $15 to help him out. Let me just scroll that I spent $15 to help him out.
I got to 33,000 odd people and I had 217 engage in the post in some way. Seven people joined my group because of this, 215 liked the post and I got some people commenting and starting to talk about it as well, which is kind of fantastic. So you can see here, this is an amazing system, and there are some more stats up here if you want to get really technical, for promoting a Facebook post. And now I’m promoting not just this little tiny little ad, but the whole post and the graphic to tens of thousands of people for $10 and $15 and $20. What a sneaky trick when it comes to generating traffic through Facebook.