Recently, both the CEO and the Marketing Director at my library asked about the ROI of paying for Facebook Page ads. They asked because we recently ran two months worth of a Facebook ad, and wanted to know what the ad actually accomplished.
First of all, a bit of background on that ad. We created a simple ad that focused on getting more Likes on our library’s Facebook Page (Ben Bizzle at Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library helped us with that as part of his research on Facebook Page ads). The ad was shown to people with Facebook accounts who had friends that had already Liked us.
So now, back to the question – What was the ROI of our experiment? There are two ways to look at ROI in this case. There’s the simple “Did it work†ROI, and there’s the “What’s really going on here†way to look at it. Let’s look at both:
Facebook Ads ROI – the simple version:
Goal – Our goal with this ad was to gain more Facebook fans. did we achieve that at a good price?
Spent – $591 ($10 a day for approx 2 months)
Gained – 2642 fans – averaged about 40 fans a day.
ROI – $0.22 per fan. Pretty cheap!
Facebook ads ROI – the “what’s really going on†version:
Ok, so we spent spent about $600 and gained 2642 more fans. Big deal. What’s the real ROI for that? What can you do with 2642 more Facebook fans? Here’s my thinking on that:
More eyeballs – this is important because of how Facebook works. On average, about 16% of your Facebook fans see a single post. So more Facebook fans = more people seeing your post (even if the average stays the same).
If national statistics are an ok guide, about 54% of our community, age 13 and up, have a Facebook account. That means we have the potential to reach over half of our community through Facebook … for free or cheap. That’s huge, so paying $0.22 per fan to get there seems to be a small price to pay for the added benefit of being able to share the good stuff of the library with more people in our community.
Better listening tools – Also important. Consistent interaction gets us active fans willing to talk back. Having more fans gets us the potential to have more interaction and feedback, since we are engaging a larger audience.
Better advocacy channel – this one’s simple. People say good stuff about the library. In Facebook, those posts spread. Again, more people (hopefully) equals more people saying good stuff about us.
So that’s what I’m thinking anyway. Eyeballs, listening, and advocacy. More fans = more of each (or at least the potential to have more of each).
Help me out – what am I missing?
FB Hand image by birgerking