How do I get my Facebook CPC down?

Or, alternatively, “Why Your Social Media Community Manager Should Be in Charge of Social Ads”.

Facebook advertising rarely gets good press in social media management circles. Facebook’s increasing insistence on pay-to-play has marketers balking and pinching pennies. But what if I told you paid social advertising isn’t as scary as people make it out to be? No matter how small your budget, you can get your content in front of your fans and use advertising to engage your community. You can even do it for under $0.10 per click. The answer to your social advertising woes? Your community manager.

Part 1: Why Everyone’s on the Facebook Hating Bandwagon

There are plenty of blogs and digital conversations discussing why Facebook is difficult for brands. To sum it up, Facebook used to be about building fanbases and free, organic reach– but it was too good to be true. There are continually fewer ways to avoid paying to play. It’s only going to get harder with new rules like cracking down on promotional copy in posts without money behind them.

While the griping that Facebook is becoming harder to work with [and less and less free] isn’t completely unwarranted, I have to play devil’s advocate and point something important out: Every other social media platform is also hard!

Some examples of what I mean:

• Twitter: The average lifespan of a tweet is estimated at only 18 minutes.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is getting more and more noisy with promotional content [especially since publishing capabilities rolled out to everyone].
• Google+: Even Google itself hasn’t been able to convince people the platform isn’t the walking dead.
• Instagram: The inability to post links make driving web traffic practically impossible.
• Pinterest: Even if your target audience is there, making your content stand out takes true talent and patience.
• reddit: This is not for the thin-skinned and very few brands are welcomed.

The lesson? Suck it up. It’s the community manager’s job to find solutions for getting useful content to our communities. Remember social media is media. The faster we accept that, the better off we are.

Part 2: Play By the Rules. Yes, All 3 Sets of Them.

You have to play by the rules to see results. You may hate me for this, but there are actually 3 sets of rules to play by:

The company’s

Regulatory/legal, branding and budget all come to play. The company is involved when determining what you’re allowed to say, how to say it, and which resources you have in order to say it. If you can’t play by these rules, you aren’t really in the game.

The platform’s

Everything from image dimensions to character length, targeting capabilities to language and algorithms are all determined by the platform. Some of the rules [like character length] are concrete and easy to understand, others aren’t so clear [like what a “spammy” Facebook post looks like or how to be featured on LinkedIn’s Pulse].

The community’s

I don’t mean community guidelines you set as a brand. Community rules are often the most fluid and unclear of all. It entails what they love and do not love; what makes your community take the actions you want. This is seen in clicks, comments, RTs and conversions [or the lack thereof]. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, community members will let you know if they’re happy or not and why.

Part 3: What Playing By the Rules Looks Like

When you play by all 3 sets of rules and end up with good content, you’ll pass 3 main checkpoints:

1. The content is approved by your company
2. The content is approved by or optimized for the platform
3. The content is approved by and engaged with in the community

On Facebook advertising, that means:

• The image and copy meet marketing and brand objectives
• The image is a certain size
• The image meets the