How does Facebook advertising add value for my brand? Isn’t earned media enough? Am I reaching the right customers with Facebook ads?

 

These are commonly asked questions that we wanted to help answer in our most recent joint study with comScore. The study focused on understanding how paid and earned media work together to help brands reach the right people on Facebook.

 

The comScore study Power of a Like II, published in June 2012, uncovered that fans and friends of fans are not only high value customers to brands in terms of likelihood to purchase, but also that their purchasing behaviors can be increased by reaching them with both paid and organic brand messages.

 

In partnership with comScore, we then sought to answer how paid media augments reach and, ultimately, purchase behavior.

 

The answer? Our most recent paper, Understanding Paid and Earned Reach on Facebook, demonstrates that paid media maximizes the reach and value that brands are generating on Facebook: Even brands with some of the largest fan bases can reach on average 5x more people using paid media in addition to organic publishing. Furthermore, the audience reached with paid media exhibited greater shopping and buying frequency for those brands than the online average.

 

And why is maximizing reach so important for marketers? Because reach is a significant driver of ROI. As announced at Advertising Week, campaigns that maximize for reach have on average a 70 percent higher return-on-investment.

 

Here are some additional highlights from Understanding Paid and Earned Reach on Facebook:

You can read the complete research paper here.