I am engaged in a marketing campaign for a client that has some serious viral potential. The two methods we’ve decided to tackle on the front end of this campaign are through Facebook and Twitter. Now I’ve read a lot of feedback that says you shouldn’t pay for marketing in social networking, but I have to disagree. Here’s why:
You don’t have to pay to have a Facebook account, and you don’t have to pay to 
add events, groups, fan pages and other such things. However, these are all great…if you can get people to see them. This is where Facebook PPC comes into play. Unlike Google and MSN, you can very specifically target your audience with Facebook. For instance, my current client wanted to target 40-60 year old adults in 45 of the 50 states in the US, who have a college degree and speak English. How can Facebook be that specific in its targeting effort? Because people give that information when setting up their profile (it’s not just so people know a little about you).
With that said, in 4 days we’ve been able to garner over 100 leads to our landing page, with a total cost of less than $100. That’s not a bad marketing budget…even if only 1 person converts (product for this client is in the tens of thousands of dollars).
The promotion we’re marketing is to give away a $20k scholarship to a military veteran wanting to start a recruiting business. This has great viral potential. Why? Our country has been very focused in the last 15 years at thanking our Vets for their service. Anytime a business wants to step up to the plate to thank them in some way, it’s going to get around. However, without a following of thousands of people, how would this client generate the interest in their promotion?
TweetROI. This is an “affiliate marketing” platform for Tweeples. The difference here is that the person sending the Tweet is paid per Tweet sent, rather than per conversion. In the campaign, the marketer (person or company hosting the campaign) can specify what content is Tweeted, and the type of person who’s eligible to send the Tweet. There are several metrics you can choose from. For this campaign, we chose their viral rank (which means how often they get retweeted). This morning alone we had a Tweet sent with 8 retweets. We paid $10 for the first tweet, and nothing for the retweets. To look at this another way, we’ve paid for 5 Tweets, and have garnered 70 clicks into our website from those 5 tweets. When we filter that down, you’re looking at about $0.71 CPC. Not too bad when compared to standard PPC, and targeting an entirely different audience.
If you’re looking to engage the realm of social networking, but don’t have a great handle on how to do it, these two tools are a must!
March 3, 2010 at 6:16 pm
Really fantastic post. Theoretically I could write something like this too, but taking the time and effort to make a good article is a lot of effort…but what can I say….I’m a procrastinater. Good read though.