Get more people who like your Facebook page to see this post. By paying. Real US dollars. Since I found out Facebook charges to promote Business pages’ posts, I decided to spend some time exploring the limited available options. It turns out I cannot change the amount of money, as the pull-down menu leaves me with no other choice. It may come down to the fact that none of my domains‘ Business pages have more than 2,000 fans. Perhaps there is some kind of a discount, in case you need to promote your updates to more people. Whatever the total cost, the available payment methods are the same as the funding sources for Facebook Ads. Therefore, if you happen to have advertised your product in Facebook, you already have a payment method enabled. That would be Paypal for me.
You either need a credit card, a Paypal account or a Facebook Ad Coupon. It’s quite understandable that promoted posts are in fact a kind of advertising, so no surprise there. I find a bit disturbing though the fact that charging your credit card or Paypal account is just a simple click away! Instead of clicking on “Post”, you click on “Promote” and “Save”. Voila! You have just been 5 dollars poorer!
What about the duration of the post you promote? It seems like Facebook will hunt down your business page’s fans for three days until your post reaches them. On the fourth day I suppose your post is history, much like your 5 dollars! Eventually – and hopefully – the post will reach 2,800 fans as the image shows. Those 2,800 fans will convert into incoming traffic depending on the success of your post (measured in Click-Through-Ratio or CTR %) and in the end some of them might click on an advertisement in your blog (conversion rate). That’s when you can calculate the Return-On-Investment (ROI) and discover whether the cost is justified. I guess if you promote your own product through the Facebook business page, the ROI increases significantly.
Say 10% of the fans visit the landing page directed by the post (that would be about 300 visits) and 10% of the visitors click on an advertisement of $0.20 cost per click. You then would have made 6 dollars or 20% ROI! But if 5% of the fans visit the page in question and just 2% of them decide to offer you $0.20 in the form of advertising revenue (average CTR% is usually 1%), your loss comes down to $4.40! Thus, before you click on the promote link, take a break and complete these simple calculations. There may be some sort of expected value (+EV) in paying Facebook to promote your posts!
