In the past we have heard many local marketing companies from outside the industry pitch over-hyped social media campaigns to security dealers across the nation, primarily focusing on Twitter and Facebook. In our experience, focusing on a Twitter campaign is as useful as a blind horse. But today we are retracting one of our previous statements and are removing Facebook in that category.

We recently tested a Facebook wall boosting campaign for a security company client. For those who are not up to speed with what boosting is, it is simply advertising a post on your Facebook wall by paying for it to be shown to friends of your fans and/or to a particular demographic of your choosing.

Since Facebook has a tremendous audience and a great diversity in targeting options, you can choose to show your post to users within a zip code radius, users with particular interests, users who like particular groups, users of a particular age group, of a particular sex and much more.

For this test we decided to focus on two goals: first, generate more likes to the Facebook page, and second, generate visits to multiple landing pages in the hopes that the visits would turn into leads.

Our budget for these boosts was $200, and, to be quite honest, our expectations were not very high. We created multiple landing pages to direct the clicks relative to the posts.

One example was a post we made with a picture of a father looking at his little daughter captioned, “Ever wonder what daddy’s little girl is doing who’s not so little anymore? Click Here to know what your teen daughter is doing at all times!” 

We then took the visitor to a webpage dedicated to fathers with teenage children where they could learn how installing a complete home security system with a wireless video would allow them to access their wireless cameras to see when their children get home and who they came home with.

Believe it or not, it not only generated leads, but one of the boosted posts also generated an additional 30 likes to the page, 12 shares and 15 comments. Now you might say those numbers aren’t very impressive, but we encourage you to take a look at your own Facebook page.

We would bet you are getting only one to three likes per posts with one to two of them being either internal employees or your friends or family.

Over the years we have tirelessly searched for one successful Facebook page that not only had many likes but also generated interaction from the company’s fans. Not even the big boys had much interaction; it is what we call the empty abyss, with many posts from your company but no one really interacting. To our surprise, by testing the waters in Facebook and keeping the topics light with the ads and landing pages, we were able to generate interesting results.

With the $200 budget and multiple boosted posts, the campaign was able to generate a reach of 12,000 users, more than 176 likes of our posts, an additional 120 likes of the page, 42 shares and 119 clicks to our landing pages. If you’ve ever done a Google PPC campaign, you know that some relevant keywords to your local service area can go as high as $45 per click.

So today is a rare day. We stand corrected on being a negative Nancy with Facebook due to our taking just $200 and seeing results. We still stand by our statement to not waste your time with Twitter: it’s a waste. But should you have a successful story to share, by all means, do tell. We’ll be the first to tell you we don’t know everything, but we’re learning more every day.

 Adios amigos! Until next time, believe in the purple cow — and who would have thought… Facebook!