So last week, I realized that my Facebook page just reached 300 likes. While not all 300  people will probably see my posts because of the Facebook algorithm, I realized that hey, 300 is still a pretty nice number and it’s not so easy to get to that especially when you don’t post as much as I do. So thank you, friends and family.

As a little gift, Facebook people had the chance to get a free ebook copy of Fall Like Rain via Instafreebie. And because I took up social media marketing a few months ago, I decided to do a little social media experiment with the entire thing. I figured I had enough data points already to see if it will work or not.

Here’s what I did:

1. Ran a Facebook ad for 2 days – budget was Php 150, with some usual romance-related categories that told me I could reach up to 3,000 people.
2. Also ran an Instagram ad via FB, so I could also see what an ad looks like, and if it would convert.
3. Didn’t do much tweeting about it, because it was a Facebook promo, although a day into the promo, Instafreebie tweeted about it because I had indicated that the promo was shareable.

What happened?

This is what Facebook/Instagram gave me back:

So yes, I did reach 3,000+ people, and there were more than 1,000 reactions to my photo – that’s about 32% engagement. But from the 1,085 actions, only 11 were the link clicks, which translated to about 5 around Friday, until Instafreebie tweeted about the giveaway which gave me 16 more downloads. If I’m basing it on the 11 clicks and 5 downloads, that’s just roughly 1% of the total actions, but 46% converted by downloading.

I’m pretty sure all 5 were from Facebook because the Instagram ad had no clickable links – that was my bad. Tip: when posting Instagram ads, make sure it has a link (or a video) instead of just a photo with a caption that contains a link. The 1,036 likes on the Instagram ad gave me an estimate of the target audience, though, so I expect that I’ll get to have around that kind of benchmark when I run another experiment. That said, there could be just some people who like liking stuff on Instagram, so we don’t know.

I didn’t exactly get any return of investment in this, except maybe a practical application some of the things I learned in my social media marketing class. I must admit that Instafreebie’s tweet was still more influential in terms of downloads, so maybe Twitter is still the best way to market books?

So there’s our social media marketing lesson for this day, sort of. I’m definitely experimenting more next time.

One more thing: I’ve got some fun stuff coming up this month, and I’ll be releasing som of the news on the mailing list first. If you want to have first dibs, click here to sign up for my mailing list (or use the form on the side to sign up). I promise not to spam you. (And there may just be a gift hiding in the confirmation email. :D)