Recently I discovered this article on the Copywriter Club discussing how they got 1,636 comments, 951 shares, and 61 replies on their Facebook ads.
Reach and follow campaigns have always been cheap, so I wondered how easily can you use Facebook ads to attract comments on posts?
If I could make this work then I thought I could use it as a cheap and fast way to get feedback on ideas for my marketing podcast or blog.
It could have opened a world of possibility where advertisers could draw on the collective wisdom of certain groups on Facebook, by targeting their interests etc.
Sadly, I very quickly found that this doesn’t work.
Here is how I wasted $27.19 finding that out.
Campaign Setup
First thing – jump onto Facebook and fire up an engagement campaign.
When you look at the engagement of active, it seems to suggest comments as well without listing it explicitly given the graphic.
If they meant only likes, then they need to change the wording to make it clearer than simply post engagement.
I put the budget at $10 US per day.
Audience Targeting
Nothing fancy for the audience targeting, I just went for a broad interest and narrowed down the age groups to be a little bit more fit for who I wanted to hear from.
Looking back, I probably didn’t even need to bother with the age groups. Not that that would have changed the outcome anyway.
The estimated audience size was very nice and large, so definitely should be pretty easy to get some cheap engagements.
Ad Creative
For the ad, I went for an leveraging an existing post designed to look as natural as possible.
My hope was that it would come across as something that you would see in a feed, potentially liked or engaged with by somebody in your network.
I called out to the group in the beginning of the post, and let and then finished off the post where the CTA to comment.
Results
Overall, I ended up spending $27.19 before pulling the plug on the experiment.
I was getting engagement, whatever that means, at $0.66.
One of these post engagements that I paid for included a laugh-out-loud emoji reaction.
Thank you to that person.
Thankfully there were no angry faces. 😂
The people who engaged with the post were largely irrelevant to my audience as well, which is a bit of a shame. If they were relevant folks then I could have at least invited them to follow my page.
As you can see, this was a total flop but an interesting experiment nonetheless.