Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Facebook's Boost Post Promote Feature Review

If you own a business it is imperative that you have a Facebook page dedicated to it.  You can find the BeBe Babies and Friends Facebook page here in case you are unfamiliar with what I'm talking about.  Some artists use a Facebook personal page as their business page, but I wouldn't recommend it.  The reason is because Facebook offers many tools that you can utilize on your business page that you can't on a personal page.

Right now I only pay attention to my "likes" statistics page, as well as how many people each of my posts reach.  I also pay attention to comments and likes of each post of course.  I am hoping to do some research over the following weeks to find out how I can use the Facebook statistics in a more productive way.  Because while I understand that more "likes" and more people "reached" means something, I don't really know how to analyze the data to tell me something useful.  I'll let you know what I discover along the way.

For today though I would like to share with you my experience and results using the Facebook promote tool for the first time.  While I was in the US I was working hard to re-open and stock the BeBe Babies USA shop as well as get the word out that the shop had re-opened.  I had noticed that when I posted on Facebook in the past it would ask me if I would like to "boost my post".  I had clicked on it previously but realized that it was a paid service, and I generally don't like to pay for things I'm not sure will produce profitable results.

However seeing as I wouldn't be in the US long, and not very often at that, I decided to give it a go.  There are several options you can chose to target your audience as well as limit the cost and days your "boost" is running.  I chose to target people who like my page and their friends, as well as the countries USA, United Kingdom and Australia, because that is where the majority of my customers live.


It looks like this.

Next you chose your price.  I went with $20 for 2 days.



Each selection that you change tells you the amount of people you should reach with that configuration.  I believe my reach was estimated at 3,500-9,200 people.  The post I chose to "boost" was a group of photos of brand new and available dolls.  I had four different dolls available.  The important thing to note here is that you are paying to promote one post, not your entire page.  Here are the statistical results of my boost via Facebook.



I "reached" 5,466 people which is pretty amazing considering on average I reach about 300 people per post.  I also had 141 likes on the post, and, while it varies, I have never had more than 100.  I also added nearly 100 new page likes in 2 days.

Now who cares about all these statistics?  Like me you are probably thinking, did anything sell as a result of this advertisement?  Did you make any money??

Well let me tell you friends I most certainly did.  I sold every doll in the post as well as added 4 orders on top of that.  For me that was several hundred dollars profit.  Well worth the $20 investment.

Now obviously this tool could get expensive if you wanted to use it all the time.  Also there might be different configurations to try to maximize the results.  I would recommend only boosting posts that could lead to direct sales.  For example, posts of available dolls, preferably when you have more than one doll.  I am hoping to try this tool again in the near future, once I have something really good to share.  

Another thing on my mind is the results after the boost.  I have noticed that my traffic has increased overall, but only slightly.  For the most part my stats have returned to their normal rate.  I haven't noticed an increase in sales since the boost, and posts after the boost haven't increased much in likes or "reaches".  So while I'm thrilled with the results of the paid advertisement, I would like to see a much larger sustained increase.  This will be something to seriously consider before making the decision to pay for this service again.

2 comments:

  1. That is great to spend only 20$ to make profit. that is good but it would be nice if it boost long term effects.

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  2. Yes I agree. Will have to see what the next one brings.

    ReplyDelete