Is Facebook Paid Advertising worth the expense?  Not unless you closely manage the details.

Un-managed Facebook advertising — or using the default settings result in quick growth in “likes.”  In our test at our FaceBook Page, the likes averaged out to about $1/per.   The problem is that not one of the likes we obtained would we have otherwise “qualified” relative to our business as a prospect.

Organic likes and other interaction on FaceBook are generally very high quality — in other words, those contacts have shared interests with the content expressed in your page.  But this is slow.

Commercially, using social media is becoming a prerequisite — companies must have a SM presence and be active.

The question becomes, how can a company grow it’s SM network and thus it’s marketing reach?  Organically, is way too slow.  So what about paid advertising?  Our answer is: Possibly.

Testing the process can cost as little as $50 to see what kind of likes you ‘catch.’  There is a ‘normal’ learning curve engaging the ad design and control panel.   If you’re familiar with Google Adwords, many of the conventions you’ve experienced there, seem to be echoed in the FaceBook tools.

Bottom line, we’re not satisfied with the default results.  So we’ll be following our own advice in a re-test.   Look back here for a report in a week or so … our aim is to improve the quality of likes by controlling the audience for our ads very closely.