sept14_b.indd September 2014 427 C&RL News Scott W. H. Young, Angela M. Tate, Doralyn Rossmann, and Mary Anne Hansen The social media toll road The promise and peril of Facebook advertising In the world of Facebook, can money re-ally buy popularity? At the Montana State University (MSU) Library, armed with a small advertising budget, we aimed to find out. After two years of using the library’s Facebook page as a free avenue to reach users, we decided to explore different paid routes available within Face- book. Our goals for implementing a Face- book advertising cam- paign were primarily to increase user awareness of library services and resources, and second- arily to understand the mechanisms of Face- book advertising. Our experiences allowed us to get a glimpse of life on the Facebook toll road. Most libraries with a Facebook presence will be familiar with the concept of organic growth. This type of growth represents social media interaction that does not result from the aid of paid promotions or advertising. Organic growth is driven by strong content, and it results mainly from a community en- gaging with social media posts in the form of likes, shares, and comments. Engagement is a key metric here. Not only does it indicate positive community reactions, but when a post receives high engagement, that post is more likely to appear in the News Feeds of friends, resulting in further engagement and the increased potential for new followers. The News Feed is the continuously updating list of status updates, likes, and other activi- ties from people and pages that a user fol- lows on Facebook. As the primary way users interact with content, the News Feed is an im- portant element of the Facebook experience. In studying the News Feed and the engage- ment levels of different types of content, we noticed that two posting categories often result in high engagement and organic growth for the library’s Facebook page: “Library Events” (Fig. 1) and “Library Employee Highlights” (Fig. 2). We used these Scott W. H. Young is digital initiatives librarian, e-mail: scott.young6@montana.edu, Angela M. Tate is program coordinator, e -mail: angela.tate@montana.edu, Doralyn Rossmann is head of collection development, e-mail: doralyn@montana.edu, and Mary Ann Hansen is research commons librarian, e-mail: mhansen@ montana.edu, at Montana State University © 2014 Scott W. H. Young, Angela M. Tate, Doralyn Rossmann, and Mary Ann Hansen ACRL TechConnect Figure 1. Post Highlighting WriteNight. View this article online for more detailed images. C&RL News September 2014 428 observations of organic growth categories to inform our strategy around paid growth. Libraries with a Facebook presence may be less familiar with the concept of paid growth. In contrast to organic growth, paid growth represents social media interaction that results from the aid of paid promotions or advertising, which on Facebook entail either an ad or a promoted post. An ad is self-created and includes a pho- tograph, a headline, and 90 characters of text which are dis- played on the pages of people who meet certain criteria pre- selected by the ad creator. Promoted Posts, which be- come available to administrators of Facebook Pages with more than 400 likes, occur when a monetary invest- ment is applied directly to an individual post. Facebook uses the term boosting to describe this process whereby the Promoted Post is elevated in the News Feeds of followers, ostensibly to increase visibility and engage- ment. Promoted Posts allow for a high level of content flexibility because any individual post can be promoted. In contrast to the more static and pre-prepared nature of ads, Promoted Posts offer a way to reach follow- ers without the appearance of an overt ad. During our advertising experimentation, we maintained a sensitivity to alienating our existing community with activity that could feel intrusive, commercial, or otherwise unwelcome. Existing research around social network advertising suggests that users’ reac- tions to Facebook advertisements range from disinterested to annoyed, depending on how well-targeted ads are.1 This research indicates that successful social network advertising features entertaining content that is central to users’ Facebook-related initiatives. With this in mind, we aimed to create attractive advertisements that would be relevant to specifically targeted user groups. Advertising campaign approach Facebook Ads Manager is the interface used to create targeted ads and make payment decisions. Administrators simply enter text, images, and demo- graphic targets into provided templates and rely on Face- book’s internal ad- vertising algorithms to display ads to the targeted audience. There are both sim- ple and advanced options for target- ing ad audiences, based around the term reach, which is defined by the number of unique users who will possibly see your ad. We chose to limit our ad reach by geographical region and age, targeting our ads to users 16 years of age or older and to the 12 states in the United States with at least 100 students enrolled at MSU. We identified this audience as likely to be interested in our library and responsive to our ads. Facebook provides two payment options for ads: CPM (cost per impressions) or CPC (cost per click). CPM represents payment per 1,000 impressions, which indicates that charges incur when the ad is presented to us- ers. CPC represents payment per click, which indicates that charges incur when users click on the ad. According to Facebook, ads are optimized with CPM so that ads will appear to those users most inclined toward the content promoted within the ad.2 For CPC, Facebook will show the ad to users most inclined to click through but not necessarily to take any further action, such as liking the page or lik- ing a post. Facebook provides the option of linking an ad to either your Facebook page or an outside website, such as the library’s homepage. The CPC model is often used Figure 2. Post Promoting Library Employee September 2014 429 C&RL News for linking to outside websites. With the goal to increase page likes, we chose the CPM model and linked the ad to our library Facebook page. We committed a budget of $300 to our advertising research. We conducted five ad campaigns of $50 each, and one ad cam- paign at $40 plus two Promoted Posts of $5 each at different points in the academic term year. Ads can be scheduled for any length of time, limited by either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. To normalize our results, we maintained an identical ad for the one-year duration of our six advertising campaigns. We ran two ads concurrently during our final campaign, one with the same image and text as previous campaigns, and another with altered image and text, in order to account for the possibility of users becoming familiar and dismissive of our ad (Figures 3 and 4). Our schedule around Promoted Posts was more ad hoc than with ads. We split $50 among Campaign 4 and two Promoted Posts, allocating $40 to a traditional ad and $5 to two Promoted Posts, one promoting our digital historical photo collection and another promoting a therapy dog program in the library (Figures 5 and 6). We strategically targeted these two particular types of posts, which had also previously resulted in high- engagement and organic growth. Results and discussion Our experience with Facebook advertising produced mixed results. Existing research into social network advertising has demonstrated that Promoted Posts are relatively more ef- fective and cost-efficient than CPM ads in attracting new fans to a Facebook page.3 Our experience similarly reflected the increased value of Promoted Posts compared to ads, but we also discovered certain issues that have discouraged further investment in Facebook advertising. The most notable issue concerns a lack of consistency, both in the Facebook Ads Manager and in the results of CPM ads. Our ad results exhibited an alarming downward trend in Likes, with an equally alarming up- ward trend in cost-per-reach. • Campaign 1 yielded 154 new Likes at a cost-per-action of $0.32 • Campaign 2 yielded 66 new Likes at a cost-per-action of $0.76 • Campaign 3 yielded 32 new Likes at a cost-per-action of $1.52 • Campaign 4 yielded 18 new Likes at a cost-per-action of $2.12 • Campaign 5a yielded 43 new Likes at a cost-per-action of $1.11 • Campaign 5b yielded 35 new Likes at a cost-per-action of $1.31 We experienced a decrease in Likes from Campaign 1 to Campaign 4 of 88%, and an increase in cost-per-action from Campaign 1 to Campaign 4 of an astounding 565%. Campaign 5a and 5b showed only minor improvements, and in fact the new ad design of Campaign 5b performed more poorly than Campaign 5a. Since public awareness of Facebook’s internal advertising algorithms and systems is unknown, we can only conjecture as to why this downward trend in Likes occurred. On the one hand, the design of our ad could have been poor. In order to account for this possibility, we altered our ad design Figure 3: Campaigns 1-5a Figure 4: Campaign 5b C&RL News September 2014 430 in our final campaign. This resulted in a negli- gible difference from the unaltered ad design, and was consistent with the overall downward trend in engagement over time. Both versions in fact offered only minor improvements from previous campaigns, perhaps indicating that users become dismissive of the same or similar ads that appear repeatedly. R e l a t e d r e s e a r c h s u g g e s t s t h a t d o l - lars spent t o w a r d s advertising a r e l i k e l y ineffective for this rea- son and that users simply tend to ignore ads.4 On the other hand, our inconsistent results could be due to alterations in Facebook’s ad- vertising structure and algorithm during our experimentation period. Such inconsistencies and uncertainties serve as a deterrent to invest- ing further in Facebook advertising. Frequent updates to the Ads Manager furthermore make reliability in advertising dif- ficult. Face- book’s ap- proach to advertising s e ems t o be in con- stant flux. Ov er t he course of one year, the Face- book Ads M a n a g e r underwent sudden and unannounced changes that result- ed in an unsettling and uncertain experience. For example, even as we were planning our first ad, the options for payment changed from a bid-per-click model to a CPM/CPC model. After we completed our ad campaign, Facebook added more targeted payment op- tions, including paying per like, post engage- ment, and clicks to a website. While analytics reports from the Ads Manager have continually improved in their accessibility and readability, we still do not have a clear understanding of how our funds are used for ads. The steadily i n c r e a s - i n g c o s t - per-action of our ad campaigns combined w i t h t h e murky in- consisten- cies of the Ads Manag- er lead us to conclude that sustained engagement through paid growth on Facebook will come at a cost higher than most libraries will be able to afford. In the face of diminishing returns and increasing costs, we see Facebook Ads as unsustainable over the long term. While we do not see fruitful investment in ads, we observed that investment in Pro- moted Posts offers more positive and consis- tent results. Our Promoted Post strategy focused o n b o o s t i n g posts from cat- egories that had previously re- sulted in strong organic growth, and from there we noticed that our most suc- cessful Promot- ed Posts were library events and librarian highlights, two high-engagement categories. Since a Promoted Post appears in the News Feed, it avoids the easy-to-dismiss quality of ads, which appear off to the side and away from the central Figure 6: Therapy Dog Program Promoted Post Figure 5: Digital Historical Photo Promoted Post (continues on page 434) C&RL News September 2014 434 purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004& context=dilsymposium. Johnston, Lisa, and Jon Jeffryes. “Data Man- agement Skills Needed by Structural Engineer- ing Students: Case Study at the University of Minnesota.” Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education & Practice (2013) ac- cessed February 18, 2014, http://ascelibrary.org /doi/abs/10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000154. Notes 1. J. P. Holdren, “Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies—In- creasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” (2013), accessed February 18, 2014, www.whitehouse.gov /sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp _public_access_memo_2013.pdf. 2. See our project site at http://datainfolit.org. 3. Jake Carlson, Lisa Johnston, Brian Westra, and Mason Nichols, “Developing an Approach for Data Management Education: A Report from the Data Information Literacy Project,” International Journal of Digital Curation 8, no. 1 (2013): 204-217, accessed February 18, 2014, www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article /view/8.1.204. 4. Jon Jeffryes and Lisa Johnston (2013), “An E-Learning Approach to Data Information Literacy Education,” 2013 ASEE Annual Confer- ence (Atlanta) accessed May 5, 2014, www.asee. org/public/conferences/20/papers/6956/view. 5. The series content is freely available at http://z.umn.edu/datamgmt14. 6. Jon Jeffryes and Lisa Johnston, “A Scalable Approach to Data Management Education of Graduate Students” (poster presented at the Data Information Literacy Symposium, West Lafayette, Indiana, September 22-24, 2013), accessed Febru- ary 18, 2014, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/view- content.cgi?article=1004&context=dilsymposium. 7. See the entire workshop series content at http://z.umn.edu/teachdatamgmt. 8. If you want to see the site as in- tended for students, visit http://z.umn.edu /datamgmt14. course of content on the Facebook homepage. We will continue using Promoted Posts for this important reason: Promoted Posts appear as regular posts in the News Feed. This strong advantage allows us to locate important con- tent within that space where users primarily see and interact with content. With a limited investment in ads and with strategically targeted investment in Promoted Posts, advertising on Facebook can result in increased engagement and growth. We are skeptical of the long-term value and cost- effectiveness of ads, and therefore cannot recommend that libraries invest deeply in ads. Promoted Posts, on the other hand, offer a more consistent and cost-effective method for increasing user awareness of library services and resources. In short, our initial experience shows that paid growth strategies should be approached with restraint and should be built on a foun- dation of organic growth. Social networking through Facebook offers libraries new ways to connect with users, and advertising on Facebook offers a tantalizing but unpredictable route for reaching those users. Notes 1. Hemant C. Sashittal, Rajendran Sriram- achandramurthy, and Monica Hodis, “Target- ing college students on Facebook? How to stop wasting your money,” Business Horizons 55, no. 5 (2012): 495-507: 499. 2. https://www.facebook.com/help /www/220734457954046. 3. Christopher Chan, “Using Online Ad- vertising to Increase the Impact of a Library Facebook Page,” Library Management 32 (4/5): 361–370; Christopher Chan, “Market- ing the Academic Library with Online Social Network Advertising,” Library Management 33 (8): 479–489. 4. Zeljka Hadija, Susan B. Barnes, and Neil Hair, “Why We Ignore Social Networking Advertising,” Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 15 (1): 19–32. (“The social media...,” cont. from page 430)