Trying to connect with the FB page fans

No-one has voted on the latest poll, so I decided to try and connect with these people. Sent a message asking whether this is an overkill and should we simply cut to the chase; set up an entry fee, a justgiving page and ask them to post images.

This is the first time I'm running ads on Facebook so I don't know what the benchmark is for click through rates, but I've been getting between 0.004% and 0.018%.

Spent £26.50 and gained 7 fans on the page, which gives a cost per fan of £3.79.

If all those people took part in the competition, then I would achieve my goal. I am worried that they won't, but I'll turn up my Ego Shield and move on.

Two things that discourage me from continuing to run these ads is that they have been declining in effectiveness - I ran the same ad today as I did last week and the number of impression has dropped by half (I guess FB cuts the under performing ads) and in the mean time I have tested two different versions of the ad and after speaking with a friend, decided to open the competition to all age groups and ran the ads today like that. I had also decided that these ads are a good test for the competition concept itself, and because of the poor response I should limit my investment of time, and money into it to bear minimum .

Perhaps one should agree that my testing hasn't been very extensive. Maybe even totally insufficient to reach any meaningful conclusions. What could I learn from this and what's the next step?

Lesson token:

• Facebook ads require several weeks of testing and an extensive budget to be able to choose the best ad variant
• Always run a test of concept before investing time and money into producing i. Facebook is a good platform for it because it's cheap.

I feel that what I have learnt so far I'd rather put to work in getting my wife's photography services off the ground - something that I have been failing at (mostly due to inaction) for the past three years (SIC!)