Week 5, Part B : Learning about Facebook Data Collection

       I have taken a look around Facebook from my business page perspective. It has taken a lot of time to understand it all and find my way around. I want to share some of what I learned from a marketing class I took last year and also my personal experience with running my first ad on Facebook.

        In January I finally bit the bullet and decided to let Facebook run my latest post as an ad. As I mentioned in my previous post, everyone above the age of 18 qualifies as my target market. That being said I did not place any targets or audience preferences for the ad. I simply set a target area. I think it was a 15 mile radius, just to test the water. 

     Before I discuss the outcome, I will go over post reach vs. post engagement. When a Facebook ad is run it is placed on peoples "news feed". The number of feeds it is placed on and skimmed over is post reach. Post engagement is the number of individuals that actually click and interact with the ad. This could be in the form of expanding the ad to read all the info, liking, sharing or commenting. 

       I learned from my marketing class that the expected return on advertising is 1% engagement or a 1% return on reach. This is exactly what I got as my Facebook ad results. 

 

              To me the number of people reached is just as important as the number of engagements. Just because I didn't click on an ad, doesn't mean I didn't read it off my news feed. In contrast the engagement number shows how many people had an instant interest in the ad. It also shows me what I am getting from my investment. I ran the ad because I didn't have a large following on Facebook and was playing around with ways to reach people and get them to engage with the page. 

         I took a look at insights today to see what it was all about. Insights help me as a business owner and social media manager. I can see if what I am posting is getting a positive response and interaction. The results show if the business page is increasing for decreasing in interaction, as well as the number of followers. My favorite part about it so far, is I can see how much of the response is from paid ads, vs. what Facebook calls organic source, which is engagement that didn't come from paid ads.