The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Note: This post is the sixth installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

Once you’ve developed your editorial policy and built your 24-month editorial calen- dar, you will need to allocate resources and execute. Given how new Facebook Pages are, this is often difficult for businesses to do. As Patrick Stokes of Buddy Media has explained, “One of the most challenging parts for businesses is figuring out how to fit a Facebook Page into their workflow. Your page can’t be a ghost town: you need to be listening and engaged.”

Actual costs are going to vary widely depending on your business and the functionality you plan to offer on your page. However, the line items of a typical Facebook Pages campaign will be relatively consistent. T.J. Kelly of Edelman provides a helpful break- down of the major cost components, and the questions you need to consider:

1. Facebook Page Setup & Development

The cost of building your page will depend on one question in particular: will you be using Facebook native tools, or will you be creating custom content in iFrames? If you will be using native tools, the only costs will be time, either internally or with an agency or third-party provider. If you will be creating a custom page, costs will vary as widely as they do on your URL.

2. Facebook Page Content Creation & Community Management

As noted above, you need to have a significant amount of content created before launching your Facebook Page, as well as a plan for the next 24 months. If you will be creating your own content, it is crucial to have dedi- cated resources allocated to the task. If you reallocate resources months after launching a page, your content creation will fall off, and your fan base will disengage accordingly.

In addition to the foreseeable task of creating content for your page, you need to have a policy in place for responding to feedback and criticism. By definition, these items are unforeseeable. But while you can’t predict the specific content of negative (or positive) feedback, it should come as no surprise that you will receive some feedback.

3. Syncing Facebook With Other Social Channels

Is your Facebook Page going to be a standalone unit? Or is it going to interact with other properties. What will the relationship be between your Facebook Page and your Twitter feed? Your LinkedIn company page? Your YouTube channel? Every time you add a new channel, you need to allocate resources to monitor it.

4. Facebook Page Analytics

Recently, Facebook overhauled their “Insights” dashboard for Pages devel- opers. In addition to being able to track total “Likes,” you can now track: Friends of Fans: the total number of friends your fans have; Total Reach: the consolidated total of people who have posted about your page, news organization who have mentioned it within Facebook, and viral distribution of your page elements; “Talking About This”: a new metric that, according to a Facebook spokesperson, provides “the current barometer of how much conversation is being generated by someone’s Page on Facebook.”

While Facebook’s native performance tracking tools provide a wealth of detail, many advertisers will want to take a deeper dive and track more analytics. Costs vary, but you should budget for setting up and monitoring performance.

5. Supporting Facebook Page Engagement With Paid Media 

The most effective way to drive traffic to your Facebook Page is to let your fans do it for you. (As we explain in the section on Measuring Success, “Submits” are the top of your conversion funnel.) However, you can’t de- pend on fan referrals for all of your traffic, and paid media can provide a significant boost to your traffic. You should have a dedicated paid media budget that includes both SEM and Facebook Ads.

Download the full guide.