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Ask HN: Does Facebook marketing work for any of you?

4 points by kiyanforoughi ↗ HN
Use this article as a baseline of the discussion: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101151565#_gus

Does Facebook marketing work for any of you? I'm in ecommerce and no one I know in the industry can make FB work on a profitable CPA-basis. I'm curious to see if anyone out there has made it work.

6 comments

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sherm8n
Facebook marketing works. But I think you have to look at it from a different approach. Social media is about building human-to-human relationships. That's why ads don't work too well. But there are companies who do get good conversions with FB ads. Depending on the creative, the product and demographic.

There are 3 things that I've done to make social media work for me.

Actively sharing content - I use a combination of Feedly/Buffer to post content. So it automatically posts 5 times a day. My followers like, re-share, and comment.

Be engaging - If people message me or comment, I always respond. I believe having a high quality one-to-one relationship is important above all else. I NEVER ask them to try out my product on the first conversation. NEVER. Most of the time I get turned off when businesses do that to me.

Audience building - I think this is the hardest and most important part. If you have no audience there's nobody there to read the content you're posting. And in turn there's nobody there buy the products you're selling. You need to actively find people to engage with.

AznHisoka
I agree with audience building. It's like the huge elephant in the room. Everyone knows you need to share engaging content, blog, etc.. but how do you do so when you have no audience to begin with?
sherm8n
It's quite easy to build your audience. All you have to do is search for conversations you're interested in and insert yourself. So let's say "lean startup" example. Find people who are talking about that now and engage.

The hard part is doing this at scale while still preserving the human-to-human relationship.

callmeed
I just started using FB ads for a sports trivia app I launched (http://www.playhattrick.com). So far it's been surprisingly good. We had a big surge in downloads and usage today. Both news feed in in-app ads are getting about a 1% CTR which I consider good for FB.

It's too early to tell if I can make it profitable. Tying ad clicks to installs and in-app purchases (conversions) is also something I'm still getting the hang of.