Social Media Strategy-Strangers or Fans?

Recently I have gotten on the Facebook bandwagon. I have created two new business pages, and I am working on two more. Like many of you my time is limited by a very successful real estate business, and time spent on media marketing has to be limited, but carving out time is essential for creating new business opportunities. I had a friendly competition with a New York Realtor about our breaking news sites on Facebook. We wanted to see if we could drive each other to a 1000 fans or likes as they are now called, and both of us had done the blast invitations. He was gaining on me so I decided I would try a trick I had learned at the Dallas Raincamp which was do a Facebook ad.

The ad was limited to people who were within 50 miles of Oklahoma City, and a maximum expense of $10 a day was put on the ad. I also specified that it would not show up on the news stream pages of those already signed up for the business page. So I ran it for 5 days. The results were as follows and I am rounding the numbers.

Total expense $55 Number of click throughs 55 Number of impressions 497,000

So how do we judge the effectiveness of this campaign? Difficult to say. The cost per impression is very low. but the clickthroughs are a buck a piece. The other question is could I have gotten these click throughs some other way? And finally, what is more valuable, making impressions on strangers or cementing relationships with my exisitng Facebook database? What if each friend cost me $10 a piece, but the stangers cost omly 25C? I would maintain and it is just my opinion, that creating impressions is nice, but possibly a meaningless statistic, unless you just like to brag about size(which I quit once I reached 30). Besides, let me suggest a better way to create new friends for your profile page and your business page later.

Start at the Facebook search box. Try putting in your city. Now instead of clicking on one of the groups, go down to the bottom and click on see more results. AHA! Now you can click on not the link but the people who like it. This has disappeared on the business page sites but now you can see a group of maybe a few thousand of a geographic area and start asking them to be your friend. I tried this and surpasses the people who liked me through the ad and it only took 4 hours to do it, and it was free. I think it is important to have a hyperlocal following on Facebook because these could be your future raving fans.

Next, give them a personal message to join your business page thay is consistent with local information, but please not your name. Then show them great content, download an IDX widget, send your blog post to it, and use Posterous to get great local written content to it. Facebook business pages are a big deal. Remember, when someone clicks that they like it, they are also giving you permission to talk real estate rather than shove it down peoples throats on the news stream. Besides, it saves my updates on the news stream to create relationships that will lead to liking my page and becoming my fans. Then I can say like Sally Fields, "You really like me"!