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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone been able to prove yet that social marketing can successfully build sales and not just more social-network following? "Likes" are nice, but they aren't green in my pocket.

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FB is the largest single referrer to our site. Using google analytics tracking, I can see that inbounds from facebook are directly linked to tens of thousands of dollars in sales. I have had terrible luck with facebook advertising, but we get great results when people share their bike rides on our site using facebook. Their friends who are probably bicyclists themselves see the link and come through our funnel.

You need both a good funnel, and a message that provides value to a user. It has been crudely expressed as "do you get your user laid", less crudely as "make your user look cool". If you do this, then they'll share your service to all their friends for free. In our case, someone is proud to ride 100 miles, and they'd like to show it off. Our tool let's them do it, so they paste it around on facebook. It's all about your value prop and how someone feels sharing that with others.

> I have had terrible luck with facebook advertising, but we get great results when people share their bike rides on our site using facebook.

Well I think that's an interesting point—this isn't what I typically think of with facebook advertising (i.e. "like" shopping). Figuring out a way for users to demonstrate to other users the value of your product is pretty much ideal, though—it scales very well and I would imagine it's much, much more effective than traditional, sidebar advertisements. Why don't they emphasize this more? I would assume likes are more valuable to them directly as opposed to advertisers....

Facebook advertising has been a massive win for us, and we are seeing > 80% of our Facebook customers are new. It's simply a huge piece of the internet that we were not hitting, because, while the intent piece of Google search is great, there are many people who don't even know our product exists. TV advertising has developed the way it has for a reason.

Have you controlled for all factors? This seems like circumstantial evidence at best; just because facebook customers are new doesn't imply that the improvement is due to facebook.

You are right, we could definitely do more work on controlling all factors here. However, the numbers are so staggering (80% of a not insubstantial group of customers - something we haven't seen in any of our other channels), coupled with the anecdotal evidence we've gathered from surveys and monitoring the comments we get on Facebook (I know, not data, but in the absence of data, I make do) that it seems likely. This is also something that AdRoll has seen - they only see ~19% overlap between people who click through their general display and FBX ads (I haven't seen the study, but they imply that they did some extensive research here).

Likes prevent people from leaving. They let your potential customers browsing your site know "hey, we're not a scammer there are real people who bought and loved our products and services, here's a authentic list of them."

> They let your potential customers browsing your site know "hey, we're not a scammer there are real people who bought and loved our products and services, here's a authentic list of them."

More like "We will annoy you with social network notifications, sell your data, and pollute your facebook page".

EDIT: Certainly not everyone, but if you ignore the downsides you're not spending your money well. Being polite with respect to interacting with your customer is value in itself, and you cheapen your brand by including social buttons. Even the choice of button matters: including a share button treats me with more respect than like buttons AND provides a much higher quality recommendation for your brand per click, even if the clicks go down. If you're advertising on Facebook without testing which provides better numbers at the end of the quarter, you're probably not spending your money as well as you could.

You're following ideology over reality. You have a one sided point of view, a negative one at that, and where... may I ask is your e-commerce site that's devoid of "cheapening" social buttons? I've got thousands in revenue at my little http://dayonepp.com store.

And why are you so negative and hostile towards something over 1 billion people signed up for?

But does it? That's the rationalization, but does it actually? I see a million likes on a page and I think "someone paid for a million likes". Does it actually translate to sales? Or is it all just the ol' 90s hitcounter?

And since I acknowledge that it must work for someone (just like Nigerian Prince Scams work on someone), the more important question is, "and is it worth the effort and cost?" I could spend weeks building a social following for a local business, or I could run a coupon deasl.

Don't think of likes as "getting someone to like my page will make them more likely to buy." You need to think of them as "this increases the network of people who will interact with my content, ads or otherwise, thus spreading them to their friends organically (so I don't pay)." This actually should discourage people from buying scammy likes, because that network will be substantially more valuable if it is more representative of who you want to reach.

1) YOU are NOT the average customer. You're one of us, you're immune to most of the social media marketing that consumers pay attention to.

2) It's FREE. Create a facebook page for your business, upload a photo, copy paste the like box code and call it a day. Jesus Christ what do you have to lose?

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