Facebook has been a bit naughty this past year, what’s with the profile page facelifts, near non-existent organic reach, “network connection class” and countless news feed algorithm changes. All of these updates can result in a messy soup of confusion and leave you wondering how you are going to grow your page.

Despite these changes we are proud to announce that we are about to break 100,000 Facebook fans with our client Silverlit Toys, here is our Digital Advisor to explain.

Mo Money, Mo Likes?

What is the ratio of paid advertising vs. organic posts?

We do ~20 posts per month, only 15% of them are boosted.

How much advertising was involved in reaching the milestone?

I can’t disclose the ppc amount as its confidential =) Let’s just say we started off with something relatively small, the client was very happy with the healthy engagement level and fan growth, then we added more and more in time. We also wanted to expand the communication to a more international group than just the US fans and the ads managed to acquire a lot of European fans for us.

We’ve hit a new low

With Facebook’s organic reach being lowered how do we stay in touch with fans to make sure they are seeing our posts?

Simple, with the consistent and methodical use of PPC ads!

We have eyes and ears everywhere!

Are we utilising social listening/monitoring software?

I use Hootsuite to manage my pages. For Silverlit we have a Facebook fanpage, Instagram and Twitter. We are getting a lot of mentions and fan enquiries everyday, so we need to be able to manage the requests and respond to them effectively.

Get those creative juices flowing

How much content was supplied by the client vs. created by our team?

We basically created all of the posts, client will provide us with info / samples of the toys (yay!) and we will handle the rest. We browsed a lot of toy industry news websites/forums/fan pages each day

What tone do you use when creating content (serious, light-hearted, informative, mixture, etc.)?

We have a very geeky tone and manner. We want to build stronger relationships within the toy community so we post contents that showcase the Silverlit products and innovative ideas from their team. Silverlit has many loyal fans so we want to interact with them on a regular basis, sometimes we will send them our new toys, and they will do review videos for us and post them on their blogs/fan pages. We also want Silverlit to become a reputable and inspiring platform that attract regional distributors / toy buyers to visit for inspirations and insights.

Go on, give the people at home a few cheeky tips for gaining new fans.

– Consistent and methodical use of ppc ads with correct targeting
– Interesting, engaging content
– Try to have fun, this is social media after all
– Speak from the heart

With competition for eyeballs so fierce on Facebook nowadays, there’s no way that we can just rely on organic reach anymore. We must run ppc ads that target the right people. When I joined 3Screens 3 years ago, Silverlit only had 8000 fans, we managed to convince the client to let us try running a couple of ads to test water, with the right targeting and content, the fanbase grew beyond 50000 within a year. All the fans are very engaging, they don’t just like you for the giveaways then unlike you once they’ve got the incentives… which happens on many local pages… So I’d say Page Like ads, boosted posts + methodical targeting are the most important.

Champagne and cigars anyone?

How will we celebrate this milestone?

Maybe a massive toy giveaway?! Any suggestions?