What’s a Facebook Follower Worth?

I love reading articles like this:

What’s a Facebook Follower Worth? – Wall Street Journal

Some exerpts:

“Mr. Bishop says he puts out an average of 35 posts a week, and estimates that he would need to spend a minimum of $9,100 a year if he opted to pay fees to promote each one of them to his more than 1,500 followers.”

Interesting thought. If we were having a coffee, I’d offer this advice to Mr. Bishop, “Since you post 5 times a day, 7 days a week and that’s effective, find out which ‘kinds’ of posts are the most effective and promote those to get the biggest bang for your buck.”

Facebook Promoted Posts work. But like all things, it works best when tied to a goal. Done right, you should be able to add new fans from promoted posts at around $1 a fan. So, spending $9100 this year he could have over 10,000 fans.

That would be my goal: using Promoted Posts to find new Fans.

More fans should help, right?

To his comment – I don’t think he should be promoting every single one of his 35 posts a week. That’s a waste. I agree. That doesn’t mean that throwing a few hundred bucks a month to juice your best posts on the page is a terrible idea. The more fans you have, the more engagement  you get, the more your content is viewed, the more fans you get. It does work.

Back to the goal: Promoted Posts to find new Fans. Not all posts are created equally. Some of the posts at Classy Catering Creations (https://www.facebook.com/ClassyCateringCreations) have more Likes and Comments than others.

Let’s find out which ones. Where do we go?

Facebook Insights. The Analytics of Facebook.

I know. It’s a pain to use, but it has great information buried in the depths of its downloads.

Let’s go pull the data from Insights:

Click on EXPORT DATA. Pick up a date range that covers a good chunk of posts. Pull that into Excel.

I know what you’re thinking: impressive spreadsheet, right? It’s huge. All the way out to CO for columns? Nice.

Let’s find those columns that are worthwhile.  For what we’re after here, stick with the Daily columns. Daily New Likes, Daily Total Reach, Daily Viral Reach, Daily Total Impressions, Daily Total Impressions, Daily Viral Impressions, Daily Reach, Daily Total Impressions. That’s a quick list. . .a way to get out of the sea of data.

Let’s graph a few of these data points. . .Date on the X, # of new likes on one Y and # of total impressions on the other Y.

Look for spikes. Find those dates. Go back to the posts on those days.

(here’s the hard part) Figure out what kind of post that is. Sometimes it’s easy – Photo; Poll; Offer – other times it’s not so obvious.

What now? Test a promoted post.

At 1500 fans, it’s a $10 proposition.

Take a quick measure of # of Fans before, then look at it a few days after it runs. That should give you a little encouragement.

Spend $100 over a month doing the same thing. Keep everything else the same. 35 posts a week. . .120 in a month. Promote 10 of those for $10 each time.

100 new fans. Easy. Tied in with the other marketing efforts at Classy Catering Creations it might just fit into the overall Cost Per Acquisition strategy.

(You can read more about CPA, Analytics and Goals here)

Good stuff.