Paying for Facebook Marketing

By Adam  |  5 Aug 2015 19:00:00

Social media marketing is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your old customers and to try and reach new customers. Facebook is one of the most popular social media outlets and I can see why you might want to use it. In the past, I wrote a post about how to best use Facebook for social media marketing; you can find that post here, and hopefully it will prove to be quite useful and interesting to you. If you are not hugely familiar with social media marketing, please read that before you read the rest of this post.

Assuming you've read that post, you will now see that Facebook is a useful marketing tool. But there's a catch. Facebook realised that a lot of people were using their service as a free marketing tool and, instead of being pleased and trying to use that as a way to persuade people to sign up for Facebook, they tried to monetise it. Facebook now severely limits the number of people who see posts made by a business page. Generally, only 2% of each page's audience will see what you've written. This seems very unfair to small businesses without much of a budget. You still can use Facebook in order to do lots of good marketing, but growing your Facebook audience is a much slower process than it was in the past because of this.

So what can you do? Is their paid service really worth it? Well, when you pay Facebook they will 'boost' a post of yours for a daily fee. This will ensure that all of the people who 'liked' your page are likely to see your post and, also, that people who have not 'liked' your page and who maybe have never even heard of you, will see it too! These will be specially targeted people who are most likely to have an interest in your business. So if you wrote an especially good piece of content that you shared, or posted a pretty striking graphic or photo and you wanted as many potential customers as possible to see it, then it would be a good idea to 'boost' the Facebook post about it.

Of course, it is sad that Facebook's effectiveness is not what it was a year or two ago, but it still can be useful without a payment (it is just harder) and the paid service is still just as helpful as it was before. One thing to avoid, however, are external sources who claim they will be able to increase your 'likes' as, more often than not, these are scams and the 'likes' that you will be getting are from bot profiles and so will absolutely not be worth your money.

So bear that in mind and, if you are not yet on social media, why not start your marketing campaign now? It would definitely be worth your time.