Resolution #120: Pay Facebook To Promote This Page...

Date: 4-30-2014

Due Date: 4-30-2015

Resolution: In my most foolish resolution to date, within the next year I will pay Facebook $5 a day to promote my The Wicker Breaker Facebook page. I've dabbled in it and have found that yes you will end up getting more likes, but it doesn't seem to lead to more traffic to the actual website I am promoting.

I've also noticed that even if you pay it just means that your page is somehow promoted. You don't see any boost in the "people who have seen this post," ratio.

I've also experimented with paying to promote individual posts which did lead to a crazy boost in the noted "people who have seen this post," count but did not add any significant amount of visits to the link that I paid to promote.

Because of this, I will choose one link a week to pay $5 to promote to see what happens.

Based on my dabblings this whole paying Facebook to promote your page is the most foolish of any of my April Fools themed resolutions so far.

As always, I'll keep you posted.

Result #120: I Successfully Experimented With Facebook Marketing… But… Any Future Advertising Funds Will Go Elsewhere…

Update #1: The Conclusion…

Date: 4-30-2015

I've now experimented with Facebook's marketing options four times and though the numbers change as promised I wouldn't say that I've had positive results.

First I bought advertising to promote the Facebook page. They claim that for X amount of dollars you'll get at least Y more "Likes" to your page per day. They're right. I paid $5 and got at least 20 new likes a day which was the promise at the time.

The problem is that even though I saw an increase of likes to my Facebook page I saw no difference in the amount of traffic on the actual website that the page promotes. Being that all I use the Facebook page for is to post links to the site, I'd expect these new likes to equal more traffic.

Then I tried to boost an individual post. Again Facebook claims that for X amount of dollars you can expect your "People Reached" to increase by Y. Again the numbers matched the promise but also again I saw no difference in the traffic to my site.

This outcome is even more confusing because I was promoting a specific link. You'd think that with the number of people the post reached combined with the number of strangers who liked the post that I would have seen an increase in traffic to the page I was promoting but still there was no change.

I'm sure there are other people out there that are better at self-promotion… who love the added boost from Facebook Marketing but personally I found it to be rather useless.