Did you see it?
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 “AmsiveDigital 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?
