Search, PPC, Performance, Social, Turkey

Best practices on getting more Facebook Likes (with Turkish market insights)

This post is to provide you with some insights to hundreds of Facebook campaigns and some Social Media projects and aims to answer the question: which channel is the most effective driving new Likes to your Facebook page?

How much is your Cost per Like? – The Turkish market

Back in the times when Facebook advertising was still new to the Turkish market (around the beginning of 2010) my colleague took a look at the Facebook campaign management interface and asked, where is the Cost per Fan (Cost per Like) figure? At that time this question seemed clever, but a little bit awkward. Then we had to face that this metric became one of the most important ones regarding Facebook Fan Engagement campaigns.

Love brands get it cheaper

Webtrends recently created a free report on the same topic and they compared industries in terms of CTR and CPC. Their conclusion is simple: the more ‘socialized’ the brand is, the bigger the CTR and hence lower the CPC. The range is wide from USD 0.12 to USD 1.27 per click. Unfortunately the study does not go into further detail on Like conversions but we can see that the US average is USD 1.07 getting a Like.

Source: Webtrends (http://f.cl.ly/items/2m1y0K2A062x0e2k442l/facebook-advertising-performance.pdf)

We also summarized dozens of our local (Turkey) Facebook engagement campaigns and found that well known love brands tends to have lower Cost Per Like numbers ranging between 0,08-0,4 TL per Like, the less known but still big strong have a CPL between 0,5-1 TL and niche or startup brands can get fans for 1-1,5 Liras.
How much is yours?

Which format or placement to choose?

If we talk about campaign performance and set up the campaign metrics perfectly - every channel and placement becomes comparable. If we talk about video ads, we can compare Cost Per View numbers in Facebook Video Engagement ads,  Google Display Network video ads and of course all local websites.

If we talk about getting Likes the two obvious channels to compare is Facebook Homepage ads on a CPM buy and Facebook Fan Engagement ads on a PPC buy. After testing the two channels against each other we could say that for some specific Clients the Engagement ads bought on a PPC basis performed significantly better. It means that the Cost Per Like figure was 3-4 times lower than using the homepage ads. Performance based advertising pays off.

What to expect in 2011?

Increase in prices – mostly in CPCs. During 2010 in Turkey we experienced an increase in average CPCs of about 100% and this trends seemingly continues throughout 2011. We expect that the slightly deccreasing average Google AdWords Search CPCs and radically increasing Facbook Ads CPCs will meet this year.

What’s next?

As we see that Facebook PPC ads converting Likes significantly better than other channels we most probably will see this trend continuing with another 100-150% increase in Facebook CPCs this year.
Besides this, new advertising formats have started to roar in, e.g. Facebook Sponsored stories. They are perfectly using the social engagement of our friends so we expect that even though CPCs are increasing, we can get Likes for less money than before. Of course the limitation is our current Fan base as we can only rely on our current Fans to bring in their friends. We do have to mention that Facebook introduced this advertising format together with the rollout of their new News Feed management rules. Based on the new algorithms Facebook page messages only appear in Top News, not in the News Feed any more. This means that even though a brand has already built up a community it has to spend a great deal of money on Sponsored Stories to keep visibility up. That’s actually another story…

 (Disclaimer: We aggregated the above results from hundreds of campaigns in Facebook and Google AdWords in Turkey – in agency account - but of course results are depending on how different sectors are represented in our Client portfolio – so it might be different agency by agency.)

How about Facebook Applications?

We saw many Facebook applications this year from almost all types of brands. In general, the cost of planning, designing, maintaining applications, putting incentives and launch campaigns on top makes Facebook Applications an expensive experiment. If we break down all related costs to the number of Likes we may see a number sky high.

Of course, users Liking our brand page from an application are more engaged having spent some time with the brand and having a good experience in the application. This part of course is very hard to measure and compare and that’s why a Cost Per Like is not the only metric we should use for Facebook apps.
Designing a very successful Facebook Application is very similar to creating a viral campaign. If we found the basic motivation why people should share, they will share. If you have already created viral campaigns you might know how risky it is. Needs creativity, a very good method for selecting ideas and seamless execution on the agency side and risk taking, trial and error approach and a deep wallet on the Client side.

There are and there will be very well performing Facebook brand Apps but I’d advise brand managers to go for the Fanpage Engagement ads too – to be on the safe (and cost effective) side.

Seeding – is that really obvious?

It’s an abvious choice – and the strong local blogger and social media community seemingly take the job. Seeding can work better if we plan incentives, support team and of course a strong message. Sometimes we can see that they spontaneously create a small ‘blogger’ community around the brand and support it. As the reach of blogs is quite limited, this project either cannot be judged upon Cost per Likes only – or if we do that, we end up in saying that those few thousand Fans we gathered were too expensive. We’d rather use different KPIs for seeding like number of video views or post views besides the number of Fans collected. (Have to add that the number of Fans coming from seeding projects can only be estimated as referrals are not shown correctly in Facebook Insights and there is no other way to measure this. I think we’ll see some new things coming from Facebook on this field soon.)

The power of owned media

I should have put this first. Do you have a one click Like button or Like box available on your homepage and throughout the site? Have you put that to the most visible place? If not, this is the time to do it. Obviously the bigger traffic your site has the more effective you can drive Likes to your Facebook Page. Costs not to be associated to this but surely it’s a must.

Content is king – you already know it

In many terms on Facebook we can see the past trends to come back again. As history repeats itself we can see that e.g. greeting cards live their second life. Posting nice greeting cards on events (Valentine’s Day, Christmas etc.) and asking people to tag themselves on will have a nice viral effect. And people will tag themselves. Sending one greeting card to all by two clicks is definitely easier then sending them one-by-one. Effectiveness, effectiveness!
Same is the story with simple gift supported questions. Ask the people to tag themselves, to look for a tiny bit of info on the product package or to answer a simple question and give away a small gift. Of course as answers and interactions appear on their feed will trigger more fans to come. Not to talk about the overhyped feedback rate of the post…

Summary: Facebook engagement ads on a PPC basis

So as a summary it seems that nothing works better in getting more fans than PPC Facebook engagement ads – supposing that you’ve already made the other necessary steps, have updated content and a well managed community on your Facebook page. As Facebook PPC prices are on the rise, we’ll see other ways becoming more interesting in reaching out to new fans, but surely the next few months are still about this tool.

(Sidenote: This article is a good example why digital performance marketing and social media is strongly interconnected. We as marketers have to come to the conclusion that we need to implement performance metrics to our social media activities to the extent technology allows today.)