The FaceBook Promotion Phenomena

Sometimes I'm not sure what to make of social media advertising. As you may have seen I have done a lot of it recently. I've added a "Lancer; Hero of the West" FaceBook page and ran a campaign. I also am running a couple of FB campaigns on the new Patti Waggin FB page. For those of you who might not know, Patti Waggin is the subject of my very first published book "Fan Letters to a Stripper; A Patti Waggin Tale." The FB site is becoming as much about baseball as it is burlesque. More later.

I spent $50 in running a 10 day campaign for Lancer. I targeted the USA of course and then selected a host of countries where Westerns seem to have some appeal over others. Japan, much of Europe, The Philippine and Indonesia.

It was amazing to see the numbers roll up. In the first seven days FB reached 66,000 people who went to the site. Well over a thousand clicked "LIKE." However, very few clicked onto this particular blog which is where my ad was supposed to send people. Go to the FB page and then follow through to the blog.

My feeling was this; I could only promote certain items the way the program is laid out. If I got them to the FB page and then to the Lancer blog it would be a win-win. Since when they got to the blog they could then go to the Bob Brill Books website and purchase a book all would be good. That didn't happen.

Of the 66 thousand people who hit the FB page more than 97-percent of them were from Indonesia. In checking the stats the vast majority spoke local languages and very many likely did not speak English. They certainly did not speak it as a first language. The numbers for the USA were almost non-existent. This was truly disappointing. I even had ONE in Africa although I think that was actually my niece who is in the Peace Corps in the same region the FB hit came from.

So the next step, via this trial and error experiment, was to UNtarget everything but the USA. As soon as I did that the numbers began to move upward. In the first couple of days over 500 people living in the USA hit the Lancer FB page! Clearly 156 of them actually went to the Bob Brill Books website. While so far (as I write this) no sales have been achieved, clearly there is reason to spend limited funds on the FB promotions.

The difference so far in the two sites (Patti Waggin and Lancer), and there are many which I will discuss in the next blog, is Patti Waggin is actually being accepted into the new FB Products program. Lancer is not. It's totally random I'm told and it's being rolled out slowly but everyone will eventually be able to do it.

It basically allows the owner of the page to sell products with an advert right on the page. If you use PayPal you will be disappointed because FB has a deal with Stripe and does not allow PPal. While I was skeptical of Stripe at first, after using it the first time, I found it easy enough. So far so good. I am excited to be able to use Product on the Lancer page when it becomes available. Until then if you ask me if I plan on more FB promotions, the answer is yes. But I will be careful of my targeting.