Last week in Branding Your Facebook Page, we discussed an offline ad that encouraged users to go to their facebook page, however, it seem disconnected.  Unfortunately, this seems to be the norm.  We decided that it would be a good idea to point out a campaign that was doing it right.  Join Michael Stearne and I as we discuss an offline ad for Top Chef, and how they did a good job of following through on their call to action.

With so may channels to advertise, including the rising cost of facebook ads it makes sense to brand your facebook page offline in any offline creatives you might have, however, what is the appropriate way to do that?  Join Mike and I on a two part series of what we’ve encountered on the streets of NYC when it comes to appropriate branding of your facebook page. To be clear, the example we discuss is normal and not isolated to this campaign, which we have no knowledge of the particulars of the campaign.

Facebook is well on its way to being profitable, posting 1.86 billion in Ad revenue last year alone.  With that type of growth, Facebook is demanding more on it’s cost per clicks.  Earlier this year, there was a 54% quarter over quarter increase on cost per clicks via the platform, and a projected 30-40% increase in the next year.

So how much does it cost?  Im going to have to pull out the “It depends” card.  Based on our portfolio over the last year, we are currently are experiencing an average 1-$2 per click on a typical campaign, but have gone as low as 13 cents a click on a campaign we did featuring Lady Gaga.  We also run CPM campaigns as well, which in all cases are well under a $1.00 per thousand.  Although these costs are a lot lower than Google, click thru rates are much lower, and is also a metric that affects your costs per clicks on Facebook.  Managing your ads can lead to long term savings.

There are a number of ways you can impact and manage your facebook ad costs, below are a few.

Break up your likes and interests into micro targeted groups.  The more targeted you are, the more relevant.  The more relevant, the less you are spending on broader interests that may not perform as well.  Breaking it out gives you this insight as to who is converting into a like, engagement, visit, etc.  Even if this may lead to a higher per click cost, your desired actions will be more favorable.

Concentrate on images, and have multiple variations of them.  Facebook ads are highly dependent on images, and they can make or break your campaign.  Images on FB can  lead to “ad fatigue” or “ad blindness”, a reaction, or lack of reaction in this case, to seeing the same ad with the same image popping up multiple times.  Invest time in the selection of your images and have multiple ads with different images.  Keep an eye on the frequency of times uniques saw the ad as well as the length of time it has been running.  Switching it up with another image can improve your click thru rate which assists in managing the costs per click.

For some more upcoming tactics, be sure to like our page and keep an eye out for some upcoming content related to Facebook Ad Management and other Digital tips.

@rubenq

Premier New York Wedding Photographers, Gruber Photographers successfully used social media for small business, having achieved an impressive 3000% increase of extremely relevant followers, gathered largely within a matter of just 7 weeks.

The Gruber Photographers campaign was a “like us to win” contest leveraging a give away of free luxury wedding photography services.  The contest, in combination with a produced video of the results that Gruber produced, generated significantly more brand awareness and visits to the company’s website.  The online mentions of the brand went up significantly within social media sites and organic traffic to the website from Facebook grew to all time high levels with new business opportunities.

A Successful Social Media Campaign

The campaign consisted of a sweepstakes for anyone who “liked” Gruber Photographers’ Facebook page the opportunity to be entered to win a free day of photography by Terry Gruber himself: a renowned celebrity photographer. This prize was quickly picked up and passed around the digital community and supported by Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories” feature, and with some additional paid advertising, the contest campaign helped to grow Gruber Photographers’ fan base from 30 likes to 930 in just a month and a half.

Most noteworthy about the 930 followers is that the vast majority of them are in a highly targeted, locally specific demographic in engaged marital status. Out of the total number of Gruber Photographers followers, 92% of the ones who share residency information on Facebook were from the service area of the company and 89% were from NYC.

Utilizing their photography resources for Small Business Social Media

Capitalizing on the success of the “Like Us to Win” campaign, Gruber Photographers went above and beyond what would be expected of a company’s first-time social media stint and produced a crisp and entertaining video announcing the winner of the contest. One very lucky bride-to-be had her Facebook profile image pulled out of a hat and called out on camera by Terry Gruber.

The success of the Gruber Photographers campaign clearly demonstrates how a small business can utilize its own in-house resources in a creative and effective way to gain real strides using social media.  Not only is the new fan base highly relevant to their business, but Gruber also gained impressive brand awareness and utilized Facebook as a medium way to showcase their work.

Giving their new fans a reason to stay

Gruber Photographers are now hoping to continue this growth pattern by hosting additional similar contests. The goal behind this effort is to engage the most relevant fans with the Gruber brand, having them looking out for and socially share future future opportunities to win free luxury photography services.

On their blog they tell their new followers, “But the fun is not over yet. Make sure to check the Gruber Photographers Facebook page often because we are going to be announcing many more fun giveaways in the near future. And of course we will share photos from whatever event we photograph with our winner!”

Gruber Photographers is clearly a company that understands its fan base.

Get a company that understands social media marketing working for you today.

 Changes to Facebook Ads

There are three immediately obvious ad changes: position, number of ads, and duration.  Here’s a screenshot of the current ad layout:

There are 3 ads, and they are pretty much lost on the page, as there’s nothing to make them stand out from recommendations, people you know, etc.  Also, if one scrolls down the page, the ads disappear.

Here’s how ads look in the Timeline:

There are now only two ads.  They stand out from the rest of the page’s content much better, and they stay visible as one scrolls down the page:

 Effects of the New Facebook Ads

So, the Timeline pages have fewer ads, and those ads stay visible for a longer period of time.  This will result in a significant drop in total impressions.  Taken by itself, this drop would naturally result in an overall increase in bids and costs per click (CPCs), as advertisers fight over less inventory.  However, the change to a much more visible place on the page, as well as the increased duration of each impression, will most likely result in higher click through rates (CTRs) which, taken alone, would result in lower CPCs.  At an account level, these competing forces may simply cancel each other out, leaving account-level costs & clicks unchanged.  That said, the lower level of competition and longer duration for each individual impression should result in a wider range of separation between good ads & bad, enabling better optimization.

One variable we will be watching with interest in the Timeline is the effect of ad copy length on CTR.  We have typically found that shorter ad copy works better than long ad copy, all else being equal.  On the Timeline, however, we suspect that shorter ad copy may be less effective.  Especially if the ad is in top position, shorter ad copy will mean less separation between your title and image and the other ad’s title and image.  We will be testing this heavily in the coming weeks, watch this space for more analysis.

Related Articles

Facebook Ad Management
Reading: The New Facebook – 3 Major Implications
Facebook’s Privacy Settings To Improve Updates, Photos, Check-ins, etc.

The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 5 types of “life events.” You now automatically share data about what you’re reading or listening to. There are more ways to follow and filter people. Those are just a few of the changes.

The New Facebook: 3 Major Implications via @rubenq

You now have the ability to tag friends and non friends, as well as location via your  desktop, a feature that will enhance their location services.  Users tagged can control how they are tagged and are asked if they would like to be removed.

An improvement I have been waiting on and is comparable with Google Circles is the ability to segment your content, location, photos by including/excluding your status update by friends, and lists.  Not sure why “Every One” was changed to “Public”, but I assume it was to simplify it for users who might want to explore this feature a little more.  The neatest thing about this roll out is the ability to go back to old posts and change the share settings on that individual piece of content.

Of course what I am really waiting for is a similar feature on Facebook’s business page status updates, which are currently limited to segmenting by location and languages.  For now, further segmentation is only available via Facebook ads.  For a full tutorial of sharing your posts on Facebook, check out their sharing guide.

@Rubenq

“I have been fortunate over the last year to speak at multiple venues, and Web 2.0 expo is one of my favorites, and features a diverse, savvy, and eager to learn audience.  I look forward to sharing my experiences as well as meeting other attendees for what is sure to be another great conference put together by the O’Reilly team and UBM Tech teams.”  says Ruben Quinones.

Web 2.0 Expo NY will take place October 10-13^th at the Sheraton NY Hotel & Towers in New York City. Visit web2expo.com to register for pricing and registration information. To follow the conversation on Twitter, follow the official hashtag #w2e.  Make sure to use  webny11fos to benefit for a 25% discount.

About Ruben Quinones

A digital consultant with extensive experience providing leadership and digital solutions for brands, Quinones also teaches Social Media Marketing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies as an Adjunct Instructor. He also had the opportunity to speak at last year’s Web 2.0 Expo NY, as well as Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year on creating successful Facebook pages.

Chances are, if you “liked” the Klout Facebook page, you may have seen this ad pop up in your Facebook account last Friday.

Were we actually serious about this question?

You’d have to ask Fred Dintenfass, who asked it. We were contemplating what would be our first question to kick off “Path Dialogues”, a weekly discussion every Friday via our Facebook page.  It was born out of some great discussions we were having internally via email.  We thought it would be great to go public and perhaps let others join in.  We also thought it would provide others with a sneak peak into our conversations, provide some value and credibility.  Additionally, we wanted the ability to strengthen existing relationships with our followers, and perhaps initiate new ones.  To make it even more fun, I thought this question was controversial and fun enough to play around with and run some Facebook ads, something we currently do for our clients.

I realized that this question would only be relevant towards users that actually knew who Klout was, so I placed an ad targeting users who liked Klout’s Facebook page.

In Facebook’s advertising platform, you have the option of  placing bids on either a CPC or CPM basis.  Realizing that this was a pretty unique ad from the usual ones (“like” our page, enter into our contest, buy our product, etc.), I figured that a CPM campaign would be more efficient, the CPC based campaign was estimated at $1.80 a click. 

So what were the results?

Above is a snapshot of paid specifics 24 hours later, when I paused it.  As you can see, CPM was the way to go, as this audience responded with a .09% click thru rate.  Unlike direct marketing efforts like Google Adwords, that’s actually a decent CTR on Facebook.  At the end of the first day it was hovering around a .2%, and then the CTR started dropping, most likely because the same users were viewing it multiple times, also known as ad burnout.  I did tweak the campaign several hours after launching, lowered my bids and changed the geography from nationwide to just NYC.  In retrospect if I had started with a lower bid, I would have squeezed a few more clicks out of it.

So how did it perform from a earned media perspective?

We started with having a few employees chiming in, and almost right away had a few fans jumped in.  Within 2 hours we received 13 new “likes”, and by the end of the day, the conversation was being held in other forums.  The status update received over 2,000 impressions and over a 2% feedback rate, way above average for a status post.  The ad itself triggered users posting it the ad on their Facebook photos and talking about it on twitter.  I also did a search on Google for the title of the ad, and realized that the conversation was picked up and brought over to Google Plus which was then indexed under Google search results.  Imagine that, a conversation that started in as an ad on Facebook, intended to direct users to stay in Facebook, triggering a conversation on Google plus?  A bit amusing when I saw that.

At the end of the day, we were having some fun, but it did reinforce my opinion on how you can leverage social ads to build up conversations, while getting some mentions.  We weren’t expecting nor was the objective to sell directly, but if it created a few relationships, made a few people smile, than it was worth the $20 spent.

What do you think?

@rubenq