Facebook ROI: Are You Getting the Most from Your Marketing?

Facebook continues its reign as the undisputed king of social media. Here are just a few statistics for 2012 so far:

• 845 million active users
• 2.7 billion “likes”—every day
• 100 billion collective connections
• 250 million photos uploaded daily
• More than 50% of the population of North America is on Facebook
• A typical Facebook user spends 20 minutes on the site per visit

That’s a massive potential audience. Are you maximizing your Facebook marketing potential? If you’re not seeing a strong ROI through Facebook, here are some tips for fine-tuning your results.

Avoid ad fatigue

Frequent Facebook users are the most likely to click through your ads. Unfortunately, they’re also most likely to see them over, and over, and over again. While it’s true that multiple exposures to the same brand are essential for getting your company to stick in the minds of consumers, the Internet has a slightly different dynamic: Freshness counts.

When people keep seeing the exact same ad online, multiple times, they tend to tune it out. If the ad didn’t engage them the first few times, seeing it again isn’t going to change their minds. Instead, it’s going to annoy them.
So don’t just create a single Facebook ad and keep running it, expecting to get results. Have several variations for your images and copy, and rotate them frequently, so you don’t fade into the background.

Engage in A/B split testing

Split testing, frequently used for email marketing campaigns, can also be used to gauge the power of your Facebook ads. The rules are basically the same—run two different ads on Facebook for a few days, find out which one gets the most click-throughs, and eliminate the least effective ad.

You can try completely different ads, or ads with the same image but different copy, or different images and the same copy. Split testing each of your new Facebook ads is a good way to determine whether or not they’ll be effective, and help ensure you’re rotating a set of ads that perform well.

Don’t forget your fans

While fine-tuning your Facebook ads is a great way to increase ROI, don’t neglect your company’s Facebook fan page. If your fan page activity has been sluggish, try one or more of these strategies to increase engagement:

• Post fresh content on a regular basis. If you don’t have anything new on your page, your fans don’t have a reason to keep coming back.
• Offer exclusive deals through Facebook that customers can’t get anywhere else.
• Send new visitors to a landing page that offers information about your company, rather than directly to your Facebook wall, where they’ll just see conversations they aren’t yet a part of.
• Encourage interaction by asking for visitors’ opinions, posting one-question polls, and sharing interesting content from other Facebook users

With an active fan page and effective Facebook ads, you can take advantage of the massive audience of potential customers on the world’s biggest social media network.