Facebook Page – Rick Wyers Toolbox

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In my last four posts I’ve shared some of the lessons that I’ve learned from helping set up lullubee.com, a new business that makes and markets kits for making crafts. After we launched the site and figured out how to take orders and ship products, the next task we faced was to get more visitors to the site, and ultimately more sales. In the next few posts I’ll cover several of the techniques we implemented, but in this post I’ll focus on Facebook marketing.

The first thing we did was to set up our Facebook Page, as recommended in Facebook’s “Four Steps to Business success on Facebook“.

Once you set up your page, you need to get users to visit it and, hopefully, to “like” it. The reason you want people to like your page is that your posts will then appear on that users news feed. Over time this will allow you, according to Facebook, to start “building loyalty and creating opportunities to generate sales.” The first method to get likes is to promote it on your own website using Facebook social plugins. As this costs nothing, you may as well do it, but the percentage of visitors that click on these is typically very small. The second is to purchase Facebook Ads that persuade people to visit your page and to like it. The irony of spending money to promote our Facebook page instead of our site was not lost on us.

After some experimentation I was able to create several ads that successfully generated likes on our page at costs that averaged from $0.27 to $0.57 per like. We spent some money and built up several thousand likes, all the while optimizing the campaign to better target likely customers. We justified the expense as it seemed to be analogous to building up a database of email addresses of people that wanted to learn about our site and our products. However, we shortly discovered our error.

The next part of this article goes on to show a few facts about the number of posts that your user sees in their feed …. If you assume that most of your users see your posts in their feed then you will be surprised by the facts. Continue reading the article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/elandekel/2013/01/22/facebook-pages-are-a-bad-investment-for-small-businesses/