Whilst building up ClickASnap and various other business’s we have had a huge amount of experience with marketing on social media. Personally, we here don’t really rate Social media for marketing, or, more accurately, social media pages, like Meta. Let’s take an example as to why:
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Below is an image of a campaign that we are running on Instagram:
Looks good right? A whopping 554 likes after being advertised for literally a couple of hours. But what happens if we delve deeper into this whole ‘likes’ thing.`You can’t quite see it in the picture but that ‘Learn More’ title leads through to our photo hosting site ClickASnap, but it goes via one of our other products ‘Shrunk‘. In short Shrunk tracks direct link clicks so gives a marketeer something to compare what one platform is saying against actual figures. So, we delve into these figures and what does it show us…
Wow, a whopping (sarcasm) 13 clicks. We have no idea how many people have actually seen the advert, but 554 have interacted with it, but what have they done? Just clicked the ‘like’ button. This, unfortunately is typical of a huge amount of social media users, they just scan through content just liking things that come up in their feed but not truly interacting with it. Our cost per ‘like’ runs at about $0.38, so our cost per link click? $16.19 now that is expensive to bring one person to the site! Advertisers on social media have been blinded by this value ‘1 like’ but as we can see it’s value is truly terrible, especially when compared to a site like Google:
Now let’s compare this to our campaign on Google Adwords:
This is ad spend is pretty much the same as we spent on that Instagram campaign. But right here you can see the average cost per acquisition was £0.05 or roughly $0.07. Compare that to Meta’s $16.19 and one can easily see where the bulk of any ad campaign should go!
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You can of course use Meta pages, but Meta has reduced reach to less than 1%, that means for every 1,000 ‘likes’ you have (assuming they are real) only  10 people will see your post. And if none of those 10 people interact with your post that’s it, it’s dead, kaput out of the internet world. Of course Google can’t even index it so it also cannot be found organically! ClickASnap on the other hand, 10 subscribers is the equivalent of all 1,000 of your likes on Meta! As all 10 will see your post! and your content is indexed by Google so can always be found organically should you not share it around. Of course sharing to your personal profile is significantly better but not by alot.
I hope you find this article useful and should you choose to spend ad money or concentrate on a specific site pick wisely!
Tom Oswald
CEO
Videscape Limited
11 Responses
I’m curious as to what hashtags you used or if a sponsored ad can use hashtags. I’ve just restarted my activity on Instagram but previously I found that the description and especially hashtags make a big difference in interaction. That said, I thoroughly understand your post. I never saw much activity in my Zazzle store via Instagram but I’m willing to try it a different way this time.
Interaction isn’t the problem unfortunately, it’s follow through, people on social media always take the lazy way out, click the like button which signals your support then just move on
Right, the “like” isn’t going to do it but if I go to one of their interesting posts and comment it has sometimes started a dialog and more. Social media takes work. I’ve had people visit my store and retweet after engaging with them. Instagram is a bit different since most people don’t know you can repost someone’s work on there.
This is true, but when you’re billed for a like that then becomes an issue, as one is literally paying for nothing
Very informative and perfectly accurate observation Tom. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for your feedback Craig
Wow. That is quite the difference in cost. Thank you for sharing!
Yes facebook advertising just isn’t worth it
I am so glad to hear someone in the business say this along with a cost breakdown. I have felt this way for years but never felt I had the acceptable “credentials” to make the point. Having the supporting data is nice. Thank you for your article; it is too easy to hit the like button.
Well this may sound strange but this blog make sure me feel better because I thought I understood how likes worked but I didn’t after reading this. I was thinking that maybe no one liked my photos but now I’m thinking that maybe no one is really seeing them. Thanks for the info.
Yes, also something else to bear in mind, facebook actually restricts the reach of posts with links in to discourage people posting links on the site.