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Using facebook?

No need to bid that high to start…Start at .10 to .15 per 1,000 impressions and see what the results are…You can adjust from there…
 
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How much you bid has very little to do with what you end up paying once you bid high enough to get some play.

I just looked at our ad stats for the last year for our two businesses. We have done a little over 24,000,000 impressions with a wide variety of ads. Here is some of what I have learned with respect to bids:

Bidding by impressions:
  1. If you do not bid high enough to get in the game, you will get very few impressions at all. Yes, they will be cheaper, but as long as an ad that will generate more revenue is available, it will show and yours will not.
  2. Once your bid reaches whatever the market is for your area/demographic choices your ad will start to run. Just because you bid higher does NOT mean you will pay that higher price. Your price will be whatever it took to show the ad each time. I can bid $1.00 per thousand and get a few impressions. Let’s say 8,000-10,000 per day. My cost mght come in around 80 cents per 1000. At $2.00 bid, I will get 13,000 to 15,000 impressions and the cost will rise to 90 cents per 1000. With a $4.00 bid I will get 25,000 impressions and my cost will rise to $1.10.
If you are running an ad that generates a LOT of clicks (over .040 rating) bidding impressions might save you some money, but not much. Thier alogrithm is really quite effective at placing ads to maximise income for them. Ads which bid clicks are shown based on a COMBINATION of the bid and the experience based probability that it will be clicked. In other words, a click-bid ad at $1.00 per click that gets clicked three times as often will run more often than a $2.00 bid ad.
 
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The pace at which your ad runs also is based on your daily budget for the campaign. FB will seek to maximise the ad revenue from the universe of ads available to them. If there are enough viewers and your bid is high enough, the determination on how often your ad runs will be made by your daily spending limit.

If I run an ad for our retail store in several states with demographics that give us 100,000 FB members to talk to, my ad will run 3X as often if I bid $300 per day as it will if I bid $100 per day. How do I use that? If I want a high concentration of exposures to drive traffic to an ebay auction, I bid $500 per day but shut the ad down after a couple of hours. I can generate a hundred clicks in a very short time and create buzz around the auction… just don’t forget to shut it down!
 
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Thanks for the replies. I got a little off track this weekend watching football, but it’s time to get back at it. For now I’m trying to generate more fans in my immediate area so I’ll stick with impressions. I guess it will be a little trial and error until I get the feel at price points. Thanks for the help.

Dave H
 
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Dave, don’t forget there needs to be something current for them to look at once they get to your page. A click is nice, but a “like” is nicer.
 
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Ugh, Facebook changed its layout again! Now all the information I had in the left column has been moved somewhere out of immediate sight.

I hate having my marketing being altered at the whim of another company.
 
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Facebook offered the chance to “upgrade” to the new profile now, saying that they plan on having all business profiles changed automatically by mid-March.

I, for one, like it. I have the opportunity to “like” a customer’s post without doing so with my personal profile; instead, I can “like” it as my restaurant’s profile. I also like the new filters that I can add keywords to. I’ve had a couple of instances (one, a former employee) where a fake profile was created, our page was “liked” and a nasty post was written.

I think that facebook is keeping up with the feedback they’re receiving from business owners who use their website.
 
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I don’t ever shop for “likes” – instead, I advertise in the sidebar to our local area (as you mentioned). I spend pennies per new customer who “likes” us and have almost 1500 fans in a town of less than 10K.

If I do a FB or Twitter special for the next 10 people who mention the post, we usually sell out of the special within an hour. It works great for us.
 
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it really has been a slow building project for me as well.
I do the advertising on the side but my maximum exposure in our town is a little over 6000
 
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Well, it was two years ago this next week that I started this thread asking about FB. We are closing in on 1700 fans now. (One way of looking at that number is that it is equal to about 20% of the facebook accounts in our town).

I would have to say that FB has been one of the better tools I have encountered. It is not FREE however. It looks free initially, but to drive it best, using some FB advertising is a good multiplier. Starting about 120 days after launching the page, our sales started to rise. We are up close to 30% in the last two years. Was it all FB? Obviously not. But I do think it was an important factor in raising our visibility/awareness in our local market. It has also been VERY important in driving our online business which is now about 20% of our local business and 6-8% of overall. (We are in a resort so getting visitors online is harder than locals)

Some lesssons learned:
  1. Combine with advertising. Turn ads on and off, change frequently. Stop ads that do not reach .035 click-though. (In our market anyway)
  2. Use photos, logos etc on as many posts as possible.
  3. Look for things to post about that others will add comments to or “like”. All “deals” is boring and will not drive views. Eyeballs is what it is all about.
  4. Do not expect FB to drive sales directly. It is a tremendous top-of-mind tool, but it is not a direct mail coupon.
 
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I put a Twitter feed on the landing page of my website. Since doing that I’ve seen a noticeable increase in the rate of customers signing up to follow us.

I want to do this for Facebook too, but for the life of me I cannot find where to generate the html for a live feed. All I can find are different “like” boxes displaying fan faces and such but no posts.

Anyone know how to set up a Facebook live feed to display on another website?
 
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Hey, We are writing about social media every week on http://sliceoflife.pmq.com and we want to make sure that PMQ is following all of you on all your social media. If you have social media questions you want answered, let me know at any time at melanie at pmq.com or if you think you are doing a cool job at any social media platform, I can highlight you on the blog.

ALSO, please let me know your social media so that I can make sure PMQ follows you.
 
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FB is a money making machine (for FB). As I posted a couple of years ago, it seems like it will be “free” but to use it effectively is not free. I have discontinued taking out actual ads on FB completely as they just do not drive the traffic on mobile the way promoted posts do. At this time, we probably average around 6 promoted posts per month. I promote based on geography and demographics and spend between $15 and $40 per post for probably $100-$150 per month. The posts we do featuring OTHER local businesses are by far the most popular and generate good will and by implication remind people that WE are a local business and supporting the local community.

If you have followed our FB campaigns you know what I am talking about. We not only get kudos on FB, I have had people tell me in person around town how much they appreciated their work place being mentioned and business owners thanking me for the exposure.

We are not spending what we were a few years ago when we were building our “likes” but I think the $1500 or so we will spend this year on FB is very well spent compared to other things I can do to keep our name out there in a way that we control and which allows for direct interaction with people that other forms of marketing do not. At this point, though, we could double what we spend and I do not think we would double the impact.
 
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I sometimes use my personal Facebook to get a message out and tag the restaurant.I think all my friends see it then
 
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Wow, before I add to this thread I discovered that before the update to the forums, I had posted on this very thread…my account and my posts disappeared! So I just now I got to re-register. …just weird…

OK in regards to FB, We have found greater “views” to posts and updates by taking several actions.
  1. make sure you make your restaurant an actual PAGE, and not a personal TIMELINE account!
  2. make sue you are member of the various community discussion groups. In my area, we have a ‘county exchange’ group, a ‘tri-county events’ group, and a ‘city’ discussion group. These groups are critical in helping YOU expand your reach! Make sure the group owners/managers have listed their policy about announcing or sharing sales, specials, and business info! (some groups do not allow such posts)
  3. Go to your PAGE make a post on the PAGE as the PAGE (FB gives you the option, ALWAYS make sure its the PAGE posting and not YOU!)
  4. Then switch to act as YOUR personal account (there is a bar across the top of the page that asks if you are wanting to post as the PAGE or as YOU) once it has been set to YOU, click the SHARE button on the post you just made. Not only SHARE it on your personal TIMELINE, but be sure to SHARE it to those “GROUPS” that I mentioned above in item #2
For example, we have a special pizza featured for the month. So on our PAGE, we feature a picture and give a description of the limited time special. I have then ‘SHARED’ this post to the groups I am personally a member of. The difference has been obviously different once I have learned to do this! Just a post about a new pizza or a special would get maybe 15 views (we are in a very rural town, we do not even YET have 100 like to our page!) and after SHARING our special, the reach became 250 people!

So we try to do something like this about once a week. Now that PAGES can feature NOTES, you can write informative pieces about the history of your business, or the reasons behind your specialties. Feature details about a contest. In the past I have featured a PMQ article to help our customers learn about why our pizza is not ‘conveyorbelt’ pizza.

FB allows for you to put your time schedule and menu (without a special application) which also helps you reach prospective customers who may be looking for a place to eat when they visit your town/city. I’m no expert, as I used to have lots of problems when my FB would not be consistent when it would allow me to post as ME or as the PAGE. I’ve finally got that figured out and its really helped us promote our business to a wider audience.

I hope this is helpful to those of you who are new to using FB. (PS, I have created several different pages for a variety of passions in my life, so much of what I’ve done with it was through trial and error!)

Now get sharing!!!
RPCLady
http://facebook.com/RepublicPizzaCo
 
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RPCLady said:
Wow, before I add to this thread I discovered that before the update to the forums, I had posted on this very thread…my account and my posts disappeared! So I just now I got to re-register. …just weird…
Click to expand...
Hey there, RPCLady! I’m alarmed to hear your account and its messages were deleted! Thanks for letting us know. We’re looking into what might have gone wrong here
 
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