How did your Facebook post perform?

My post got seen by 10,000 people! OMG! How awesome!

Newsflash. Who cares. Facebook post reach can be very important but if your goal is to just have your content seen by thousands of people, you need to reevaluate your goals.

Before you create any content, make sure you go through the viral cycle: Goals, Content, Audience, Amplification. 

Goals

What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to sell a specific product, reach a new audience or educate your fans on a new product or service? Our goal was to let people in Nashville know that our team is receiving training from the top thought leaders in social media.

Content

If our goal is to let people in Nashville know that Parachute Media is going to Minneapolis, how do we tell that story? Should we use a short video, or a blog post, a picture? We used a picture featuring a well known area of Nashville with short caption. Short captions are great and easily digestible. Let your picture do the talking.

parachute-media-facebook-postAudience

Who is the audience you want to engage that will accomplish your main goal? Our goal was to let people in Nashville know that Parachute Media is training with the best social media company in the world. However, just blasting your content out to everyone in Nashville is not specific enough and when you amplify this message, it will be a huge waste. A broad audience could result in a high CPM and low CTR. In this case, we wanted to specifically do media work place targeting and job titles of the people who run a company within 25 miles of Nashville. You’ll notice that these are not huge audiences. It’s ok to have a small audience if it’s targeting those who would be most interested in what you have to say.

audience-targeting-on-facebook

audience-targeting-on-facebook

Amplification

Here’s the fun part! How are you going to amplify this message so it reaches your audience and meets your goals? How much are you going to spend, how long will the campaign last, what type and how many ads are you going to run? If you’re new to Facebook advertising, read about the new ads structure by Alex Houg. We decided to spend $2/day and run the campaign June 1st-9th. The entire campaign will not spend over $16. $2/day is not a lot of money but that doesn’t really matter. You can still get amazing results with that budget but again, all of that is dictated on your original goal. Is this post something we wanted to spend $50 on? $100 on? No. We’re just letting people know what’s going on. In this case there’s no real need to spend a ton of money.

amplification-on-facebook

How did we do?

If you don’t go through the thought process of Metrics, Analysis and Action, you won’t ever improve.

Metrics

Our goal was to reach individuals in Nashville that we think should know about our exciting trip to Minneapolis.

Analysis

From only spending $1.09 and $7.72, the results were way better than I thought they would be. In total we had 107 likes, 7 comments and 14 shares. From the engagement, Parachute Media also received 10 new fans. Fans acquired from post engagement are typically stronger fans because they’re engaging with the content and then opting in to be a fan. The CTR on media work place and CEO titles was pretty high which indicates the content was good and was delivered to the right audience.

Action

The high click through rate leads me to believe the content was good. I probably wouldn’t change the creative. We used some fairly large companies as work place targeting so I would probably duplicate the media work place ad and target brands that are only in Nashville. For job titles, I would duplicate our CEO job titles ad and compare it to an ad based on job titles of anything in the social media or digital marketing realm.

Repeat that process over and over and over again. You won’t ever know if you don’t just try it out!

If you follow this thought process each time regardless if you’re using Google Adwords or Facebook advertising, you’ll be successful!