The Cost To 'Promote' a Facebook Post: $200 To $500

nonprofiteer writes "There's been talk in recent months of Facebook's 'promoted posts' option. In beta testing, it cost about $5-10 dollars to get more of your friends/fans to see your posts in news feeds. Now that it's live, it's a bit more expensive, at least for those with big followings. On the Forbes Facebook page, the cost ranges from $200 to $500 to get from 50,000 to 250,000 people to see a given post. Another lame attempt at monetization, or will Facebook users actually pony up?" This is what happens when everyone stops using RSS/Atom for syndication.

It depends on the quality of the views

[Palestrina]

Blasting it out indiscriminately, like spammers do, has a very low conversion rate. It looks like Facebook is going for a more targeted model based on what it can gleam from user profiles. But it all comes down to cost per conversion. $500 could be cheap, if your post is promoted to the right audience. This remains to be proven, of course. But I wouldn't automatically say that the price is too high.

Re:Poor marketing investment

[JaredOfEuropa]

For firms, it might not be that much of an issue? But what about people who do what they do for fun rather than profit, like popular bloggers? "Pay or your followers may miss your post" sucks for those people. Perhaps FB ran out of ideas to monetize, and use this to shift the burden of coming up with a good way to make money for this kind of stuff to its more popular members.

Sounds like nothing to me

[PCM2]

$500 to promote a post? Of course companies will pony up.

At that rate, $30,000 will get you 60 promoted posts. Say you post twice a day -- and we're assuming that you're not just posting the same thing over and over, here, but you have an actual strategy. $30,000 buys you an ad campaign that lasts an entire month.

Depending how you play it, it beats an ad in a magazine, which could easily run you $30,000 (or more).

Facebooks one size fits all model

[N1AK]

Facebook has a fundamental issue. It has allowed/encouraged users to build a large 'friend' list. This inevitably means that users get overwhelmed; so Facebook does some analysis and tries to cut the chaff and guess what you don't care about seeing. The problem is that with it's tight one size fits all friends model it has a good chance of hiding stuff I do want to see.

We were almost reaching the point where it was normal to announce big events like weddings etc on your wall. Now the people who may have done this are likely going to rely on other communication forms that they know will reach everyone.

Re:RSS

[Johann Lau]

Check out, and take time to explore, http://www.rssowl.org/ [rssowl.org]

You get an overview of ALL stuff from ALL feeds, or just from invididual categories/feeds you selected (which acts recursively, which is awesome).

Google Reader is a JOKE.

Plus, it's Google, so wtf is wrong with people anyway :P Isn't it enough they have web analytics on every site of the planet, and that that half of the feeds go through feedburner on top of that? Why not at least read the other half of the feeds in peace... ? I don't even read any feeds that are controversial in the slightest, it's mostly webdev stuff, but still, I have principles :/

Investors are squeezing

[supertrooper]

Here is what's happening right now. Investors are not happy with poor performance and they are demanding more money. This idea was on a backburner probably for a while, but now that FB is showing not as profitable as they thought it would, they are trying this. They have dozens of other similar ones if this one works. This whole company has this one "product" and nobody saw the risk in that? It was a trendy thing to do, for a while, now it's less trendy, and in 10 years it won't be trendy. Don't get me wrong, I see the value in social networking: stay in touch with friends and family, creep on some hotties every once in a while, maybe read an interesting post here and there. But it has become the biggest shouting match in the world, and it's all nonsense. I don't even notice the ads any more. If somebody is posting too much and it becomes annoying I block their posts. You pay 500$ so your posts come up more often - I will block you. You pay more - I will remove you from my friends. You override that and I will stop using FB altogether.

Re:Poor marketing investment

[garcia]

Even though I get ~1+ million pageviews per month and referrers from numerous outlets, my FB page (with only 280 likes) is the single best referrer each month and has been since the first day I setup the page years ago.

Re:Poor marketing investment

[milbournosphere]

Yeah, I saw the business story a few days ago. I think it's worth keeping an employee willing to dust things up and make bold moves every once in a while. GM of all companies should know the risks of a bureaucracy of yes-men; it nearly killed them. It sounds like he made some controversial decisions at his post, and wasn't afraid to mix it up defending them to his superiors.

Re:loyalty on the net

[TaoPhoenix]

I think I disagree, Facebook might be different. Enough raw time has passed so that everyone has at least heard that "it's okay for normal housewives to be on Facebook", whereas I think what did Myspace in was the attempt to be edgy with the Under-25 crowd and bands.

So I think Facebook is becoming the Lock-In of Ordinary Family social media, and if indeed something topples them, it will be business news in the making.