Use this article as a baseline of the discussion:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101151565#_gus<p>Does Facebook marketing work for any of you? I'm in ecommerce and no one I know in the industry can make FB work on a profitable CPA-basis. I'm curious to see if anyone out there has made it work.
Facebook marketing works. But I think you have to look at it from a different approach. Social media is about building human-to-human relationships. That's why ads don't work too well. But there are companies who do get good conversions with FB ads. Depending on the creative, the product and demographic.<p>There are 3 things that I've done to make social media work for me.<p>Actively sharing content - I use a combination of Feedly/Buffer to post content. So it automatically posts 5 times a day. My followers like, re-share, and comment.<p>Be engaging - If people message me or comment, I always respond. I believe having a high quality one-to-one relationship is important above all else. I NEVER ask them to try out my product on the first conversation. NEVER. Most of the time I get turned off when businesses do that to me.<p>Audience building - I think this is the hardest and most important part. If you have no audience there's nobody there to read the content you're posting. And in turn there's nobody there buy the products you're selling. You need to actively find people to engage with.
I've had great luck with retargeting on the FB news feed. Here's my writeup: <a href="http://planscope.io/blog/putting-retargeting-to-work-for-your-startup/" rel="nofollow">http://planscope.io/blog/putting-retargeting-to-work-for-you...</a>
I just started using FB ads for a sports trivia app I launched (<a href="http://www.playhattrick.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.playhattrick.com</a>). So far it's been surprisingly good. We had a big surge in downloads and usage today. Both news feed in in-app ads are getting about a 1% CTR which I consider good for FB.<p>It's too early to tell if I can make it profitable. Tying ad clicks to installs and in-app purchases (conversions) is also something I'm still getting the hang of.
There was a discussion on that article here earlier<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6635021" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6635021</a>