Doing Facebook Promotion on a Shoestring Budget

by George Konetes | Feb 20, 2014 | Digital

There are two things I ask people who want to use social media effectively. What are your objectives? And, what is your budget? Everything after that involves trying to make those ends meet. However, sometimes there are objectives and there is no budget. You have probably encountered a similar predicament at some point. The good news is that there are still a few things that a resourceful social media marketer can leverage.

What is Budget?

When you think about budget, you almost always think about a dollar amount. I would challenge you to think bigger than that. If you have no dollars, look for what you do have. In social media, time and manpower is as good as money in a lot of ways. Access to good images is a powerful resource. In fact, access to anything that you can photograph should not be discounted. Good ideas and creative thinking is its own currency on Facebook. Think bigger than cash.

Content is King – But Presentation is Everything Else

Good content which stems from good ideas, or at least engaging ideas, is the core of any social media campaign. But how you package it can determine whether or not you will reach your target audience.

Think about how your text looks. Long endless paragraphs or many paragraphs put together without spaces do not look good. Many people tend to breeze over them. Images are obviously critical and people are starting to realize that. But the length of your hyperlinks are important too. If you post a link on Facebook that fills two or three lines, your post feels spammy. If a post looks good at a glance, there is a greater chance that people will read and interact with it.

There is Always Some Budget for Promotion

When most people think about Facebook promotion budgets, they usually think about hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. While there are many objectives that you simply will not reach without a significant budget, it does not mean that there is nothing you can do. Do you have $10 per month you could pull out of the cushions? Most people, and especially most businesses do. And there are ways to make even small spends like that count.

Best Dollar I Ever Spent On Facebook

There are some things you just cannot effectively do on Facebook with a shoe string budget, such as boosting your fan count, running pay per click ads, or generating sales. But what you can do is boost engagement with your own audience and increase your EdgeRank. The best dollar you can spend on Facebook is boosting a post to your current audience.

The least you can spend is $1 per day. One dollar will usually get you to about 400 unique users. But that means you can still boost a post to get it in front of 400 more of your fans for $1.

Tying It All Together

If your content is good, it looks good, and it is engaging, then this strategy opens doors. If 10% of your fans engage with your content then that could be 40 likes. And when that starts to happen, your organic reach will begin to jump, especially if you are doing this a few times a week with great content. A good post could see its extra organic reach spike to double or even triple what its paid reach was. For example, say your regular posts usually reach 500 people. Then adding $1 gets you to 900. But if the post is very engaging, your organic reach could surge as a result of the $1 boost and get you to 1500 total people.

This approach can scale quite a bit as well. The more you begin to engage your current audience, the more organic reach you will see in the future, and the more your page, and your influence, will grow.