I decided to try an experiment with this past Wednesday’s blog post: on my WBK Facebook page I paid $5 to “boost” the link and see if that gave any benefits, specifically:
- Did it increase the number of people viewing my blog post?
- Did it increase the number of people who subscribed to my blog or its RSS feed newsletter?
- Did it increase the number of fans of my Facebook page?
My baseline averages on various blog statistics are:
- 17-22 page views on the actual blog site on days I post a new entry (Not counting the 48 hour period when Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman retweeted the post about her musician kerfuffle).
- 3 subscribers to the blog, 8 subscribers to the Mailchimp weekly RSS feed
- 77 fans of my Facebook page
- Between 6-15 “reach” (in how many people’s newsfeed it appeared) per Facebook post. Best recent “reach” was a non-blog link posted on April 6 about “Like farming”, which had reach=515, 62 clicks, and 31 “talking about this”.
36 hours after I posted the Facebook link and enabled $5 worth of “sponsored” posts, here are the results: