I manage a couple of facebook pages, one for my employer, and one for a non-profit that I work with (Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption).
I am constantly barraged by Facebook to “promote” a post to extend its reach, and get more responses. We recently took in a hound who had an injury on the racetrack, and we are doing some fundraising to cover the not insignificant vet costs.
Our marketing team wanted to try to promote this post to see what the result would be.
So, I signed up for it, gave them my Paypal information, and put a $15 limit. They said that the post would reach between 3,000 and 4,000 people.
4,022 people saw this post over the next 24 hours on their wall. Of this 87 people clicked on the post, or 2.1%. 7 people “liked” our page. Our website had 30 extra visitors that day (almost indetectable in the long trend), and not one additional donation.
I posted it on my timeline, with a plea for my friends to cough up a buck or tow if they could afford it. That generated the ONLY donation that we have received that wasn’t in our existing network.
My conclusion is:
- Facebook promotions are worthless. They game the propagation to try to encourage you to pay money to promote, but when you do, you get no results.
- You are better off using your own network, and encouraging them to share than to use the facebook tools.
- Facebook is a lousy vehicle for promotion. You may need to have a presence, but it just doesn’t translate into action from their billion + users.
Oh, and if you want to help us out, and do something for the awesome greyhounds, head over to this link and click the “donate” button.
