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Using facebook?

OK, what is the difference between putting a post on my wall and sending an update to fans? Will an update still show up on the wall?
 
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Question:

I’m running a photo “contest” and I just discovered that fans can’t post to an Album - at least not that I can tell. Having them post to the fan photos section would be okay, I guess… if I turned off the feature that posts them onto my wall also.

Anyways, does anyone know of an application that allows for the “clean” running of a contest like this? Or, easier yet, how to set up an Album for fan use?
 
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brad randall:
Question:

I’m running a photo “contest” and I just discovered that fans can’t post to an Album - at least not that I can tell. Having them post to the fan photos section would be okay, I guess… if I turned off the feature that posts them onto my wall also.

Anyways, does anyone know of an application that allows for the “clean” running of a contest like this? Or, easier yet, how to set up an Album for fan use?
Click to expand...
You could have the photos emailed to you then you could post them.
 
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You just need to adjust your setting on the fan page I believe…

Personally, I prefer to just have them posted on the wall…one trick then it to tag them & comment on them…

We put pizza party pics on the wall from time 2 time & if you ‘tag’ yourself, we give away a free pie

Remember, the trick is to spread the info round & round the social network…

FanPages are good, but work on building a friend base as well…easier/better communications
 
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Thought I would update this thread since I posted when I first got started in FB. I launched the FB page on March 16th and am now just a few fans away from 1,000. I’m spending 10 dollars per day on ads (between two stores, so $5.00 per day per store.)

Even with tracking difficulty, it has to be the best ROI I have ever gotten out of advertising. I am absolutely amazed at how many people are coming in and telling us they learned about the store on Facebook. We had our delivery area pretty well covered with years of direct mail, but FB is pulling all kinds of new people from outside of our delivery zone. I’m thrilled so far!
 
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We are also a handful of fans away from hitting 1000 fans. We post some things like Pizza of the Day every day. We also are doing a “Thank You” campaign where fans can suggest a local business that did a great job for them and we bring that business free pizza to say thanks. We take pictures of the free pizza being delivered and post them. Both work well and generate a lot of comment around town. Ads seem to work pretty well to generate new fans. Not so well for special offers. We target the ads toward friends of existing fans so that the ad shows with the comment line that so-and-so that they know is a fan. We are spending $5-10 per day on this.

I would have to agree that the time and money is well spent for the return.
 
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Still plugging away… we are approaching 1200 fans now a little over 9 months into the effort. We still do the “Thank you” posts and pictures and people like that. We have also generated something like 16,000,000 impressions with ads at a cost of about $5,000.

Much of the $5,000 has been wasted, but that is the nature of both advertising and new experiments. I feel pretty good now about knowing what works and what is worth doing. No question that the effort puts our logo in front of people reminding them that we exist. Posts of pizza of the day and thank you pies differentiate us and are free to do.

For people starting out, I would say that you have to build an audience on FB before any of this is worthwhile.
 
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We are also still extremely pleased with the Facebook results! It’s amazing how many people come in and say they just heard about us on Facebook.

I’ve just been running one ad that goes out to people within 25 miles of our store. I’m just now starting to use some of the advanced targeting options, as well as running specials ads that only display to our fans. I’ve just started that in the last 24 hours so I’m excited to see how they perform.

The possibilities with targeting seem almost endless. Facebook knows a lot about their members and that is marketing gold for us. The way it’s been going so far, I can easily see me using FB to replace some of my mailing campaigns at a fraction of the cost. I have one mass mailer that costs me $600 per month, per location. $1,200 in a month goes a very long way on Facebook and and I have the option of only paying when somebody interacts with the ad.

That seems a lot more attractive than blasting mail out where maybe 5% of people actually read it. You also only get once chance to get it right with a mailer, where you can almost instantly adjust your marketing approach and ads with FB.

My only gripe is that they take so long to approve ads. I would like to be able to target our fans almost immediately when we are having a slow day or night. I think I’m going to set a stable of ads with various specials, have them all approved, and then be able to turn them on and off at my discretion.
 
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Piper, as you run more ads you will find that the approval process speeds up. I guess they have some threshold of spending that kicks you into a different catagory for review, but they don’t tell you about it. All I can say is that our ads are generally approved within about 10-15 minutes now and sometimes much faster. They used to take hours!
 
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Streve,

Can you direct me to a link etc. that will show what one of your ads looks like. Or, if you can post one that would work as well.

ps
 
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I am not sure how I would show an ad. Our ads mostly use our logo in jpg form as the image. Our logo has our name on it.

I put a headline in all caps with some message like SUPER BOWL SPECIAL, or LOCAL’S FAVORITE. Then you can write a message in the alloted space. You will get good at writing things in as few words as possible.

Important note: If your ad points to your fan page by selecting the page as offered automatically, the program will not let you write a headline and will use the name of your page by default. The way to overcome this is to type in the URL for your fan page or website, in our case http://www.facebook.com/sodacreekpizza , it will then allow you to write whatever you want for the headline.

I have found that ads can drive your fan base pretty effectivly which gives you an audience for what you post and show on your page. Deals on ads do not do as much as you might think unless they are just amazing (FREE works) but the ads are innexpensive and great for name recognition.

Be sure to use the demographic tools in targeting the ads. For example, we run an ad about slices and target it to people in our town between the ages of 14 and 18 to try to drive the highschool off campus lunch business. Just being on FB has increaszed our “cool” factor with he local kids.

We have also done ads with a photo of a great looking pizza and used our name for the headline. It is all about reminding people who we are, and some simple message about why we are different. What has NOT worked is basic offers like “Save $3 on a carryout”.
 
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bodegahwy:
Deals on ads do not do as much as you might think unless they are just amazing (FREE works) but the ads are innexpensive and great for name recognition.
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Have you tried specials targeted only to your fans? I’m thinking that would be the best way to utilize that. I’m going to try an ad that directs to our Halloween Specials targeted only to our fans, and only those fans in our delivery zone.

I ran one last night advertising our Tuesday BOGO special to current fans only in the cities we deliver to. We got 3,850 impressions for $1.17. At that price I suppose it doesn’t matter much if it actually generated an order, but I have no ability to determine if it did.
 
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Yes, we have done ads targeted only at fans, ads targeted only at NOT fans, ads targeted at people who are friends of fans…

Again, special offers seem to work when they are really agressive but otherwise… not so much.

Again, I am coming to the conclusion that the ads are not so effective at driving ordinary orders but work very well to keep our name in front of the consumer.

We have also seen a lot of sucess in driving traffic to our on-line ordering through the tab on our page. We arae getting about 6-7% of sales on line now after 120 days. About half of that is using the on line promo code we present on FB.

Using the friends of fans targeting was very effective for getting new fans. When those ads appear, the person seeing it also sees the notation underneath that “so-and-so is a fan” which I think increases the chance that they will click. FB will not let you set that up until you have quite a few fans though… it will say that not enough people appear in the market.

Another interesting process is figuring out how to bid. The model they have is pretty effective. I do not find a lot of difference between what it costs to bid clicks or impressions. In the end I bid based on what I am looking for. If my ad MUST have a click to be effective, i.e. become a fan, I generally bid clicks. If I am just trying to wave the flag, I bid impressions. I also find that I can $2 or $10 and it does not change what I am actually paying by very much. The bid is like an ebay bid, it only goes as high as it needs to.
 
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Beginning October 29, I ran 6 different ads targeting two groups - Facebook Fans & Non-fans. I bid for impressions on all.

I had two different headlines, Crazy Aver’s Online and Order Pizza Online, each paired with 3 different images - our logo, a cartoon of a pizza slice, and a real picture of our food. The body of all 6 ads focused on our package deal. The clear winner for both Fans and Non-fans was Crazy Aver’s Online (mentioned name of company and name of deal) paired with the real picture of food.

So I turned off the 5 losers in my Facebook Darwinism experiment, and yesterday resulted in the most click-thoughs to date for both groups running only that single best ad.

This has cost about $.70 per click through so far (and should drop using one “good” ad). I’d love to know how many of those people go on from my Online Ordering page to actually placing an order. I need to find a Google Analytics expert to set all the tracking up for me so I can see for certain.
 
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We are up to about 200 online customers now. FB has driven pretty much all of that traffic. I just did our first email blast to the customers we got now using mail chimp which gives me the ability to send emails directly to the customer with targeted offers.

I really see FB in two roles right now:
  1. A way to keep our name out there and put information about the store to the fan base. We use ads to build the fan base.
  2. Feed customers to the online order system.
 
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Has anyone else noticed the new stats displayed below wall posts on your business page:
1,078 Impressions - Raw number of times this story has been seen on your Wall and in the News Feed of your Fans
0.19% Feedback - Number of likes and comments per impression.
Click to expand...
I can’t decide whether that’s more cool or depressing.
 
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Don’t understand how you can do advertisement for $1.00/day. I’ve gone to the page to design ad, in my case to target people who aren’t already a fan but live within 10 miles of my store. When I get to the pricing section, you have a choice of Pay for Impressions (CPM) or Pay for Clicks (CPC). The suggested bid is $1.12 CPC. So, my understanding is if someone clicks on my ad to like my business, the cost would be $1.12 for every new fan. Am I missing something? The CPM suggested bid is .48 per 1000 impressions. Does this mean that everytime my ad appears on someone’s page, it counts as one impression and for every 1000 times my ad appears I am charged .48 cents? If so, this sounds like the better option.

If everything I said is correct, my ad could be seen 2000 for .96 cents (CPM). If only two people clicked on the Like button my results would be more cost effective then if I was paying for Clicks (CPC) at $1.12 (CPC) for each person who clicked on Like. Is this correct?
 
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