Have you wondered how effective the new Facebook Page promoted posts feature is? Here are our results from a $5 post.
The annual Social Media Club DC happy hour is coming up, and with the new feature rollout to promote posts on Facebook pages, I figured why not see what this can do. The event is completely free, it is located in Dupont circle (for those not familiar with DC, a prime social location), and we had more than 2,300 Facebook likes at the time, so we did not have much to lose or gain from the experiment.
The Experiment
As a comparison, but not exactly a proper control, our May event (which had a cover charge) had an organic reach of 839 people reached (see image above). The post consisted of the Eventbrite listing and the following text and tag to our venue, "Have you registered yet for our May event Politics at Policy Restaurant and Lounge?" Based on Facebook's insights 806 of the people reached were organic, and the other 33 viral (the resulting traffic from the four individuals who liked the post and one that commented).
For the experiment I followed the same model as our May event by simply adding our eventbrite listing, and added some text; however, I also added in a quote from Benjamin Franklin about drinking (mmm beer). The full context was, "A wise man once said, "In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria." For that reason you should come join our free happy hour event on June 20! Located at Overlook 1909 Rooftop Lounge."
As you can see from the results above after the promoted post ran it's course, 1,601 people were reached this time. Not only did we get a slightly higher organic traffic number, but we also had an added 655 visitors based on the 17 likes it received. Lastly, the paid promotion accounted for 484 people reached. But wait, there is still more!
As you can tell from the image to the left, there is a greater breakdown of what happened after we reached the 484 people. A total of 10 people clicked the event link, four people liked the post (out of 17), and two new likes for our Facebook page.
So for $5 we doubled our posts reach, received nearly a 24 percent increase in post engagement, and two additional page likes. Not too shabby at all.
I believe these results will still be mirrored regardless of us having a cover charge, as we often list that on the link people would be navigating to, so this $5 experiment can still provide some value to those of you seeking to build awareness around an event.
All I can say is that I hope this feature is not foreshadowing that individual users will eventually have to utilize such an option just to promote a simple post on their personal timelines, but that will likely happen.