If you’re a brand, and you’re thinking of dipping your toe into Facebook advertising - don’t do it. I’m not saying don’t use Facebook advertising - it works and it works really well. I’m saying don’t just dip your toe in. Social is not a place for the timid, and the earned media returns on ad spends give one reason to believe that Facebook’s algorithm agrees. Like any good Bouncer, if Facebook thinks your brand will spend a lot of money, it will reward you.Socialtyze looked at our internal database of communities that spanned across all verticals, sizes, and ad spend levels, and found that spending some money (ads reaching less than 100K people per day) provided a negligible impact on your ability to reach people in your posts (-5%). This finding was supported by Wise Metrics in their recent post on the subject. The communities in our sample spent roughly 80% of their time either not spending or spending lightly, so we don’t disagree with their results. What we’re more interested in are the outliers. Essentially, what we want to see is if Facebook can be bought - and it seems that it can be.

If you reached over 100K people in a day with your ads, or even better over a million people per day Facebook rewards you. Mid-level spends saw a 62% improvement over the baseline (which we normalized by both size and average performance for that size) and heavy spends saw a shocking 200%. But, there are a hundred ways to dice up those findings, so we’ll start with looking at them by vertical. When you look at just CPG’s organic reach, it actually dropped during periods of light spend, and then corrected at medium and heavy levels.

Entertainment was the most drastic example of this rule; although, it should be noted that there is a significant skew at work here. Studios are only going to spend heavy dollars right before a movie opens - when the Facebook page would be most active anyway. But, the improvement is shocking - +309% compared to baseline for heavy spend. It essentially justifies very heavy spending on opening weekend.

Segmenting our data by audience is where it got interesting. The graph below demonstrates how it makes more sense to spend heavily on pages that are male centric than female focused. The delta between female pages at medium and heavy spends was right around 20%. That same number for men was an aggressive 173%. Based on this data, it makes more sense to spend at the medium level, than the very high if the page targets women.

Finally, where the ad lives matters; the difference between ads on the right hand side of Facebook and in the Newsfeed is drastic. If you spend money promoting your post, Facebook offers organic incentives to continue spending. This is especially true at the medium level where native advertising far outstrips the right hand rail (the area to the right of your newsfeed)(+57%). The differences are less pronounced at the very heavy level, but that is rarified spending air. Basically, in terms of a creating earned media, the best ad units focus on the newsfeed.Want to learn more about our data research team? Email us! Jake@Socialtyze.com