How much marketing budget should I spend on a facebook campaign?

[Devin Pringle]

There are a couple ways to approach this. As someone already pointed out, you can leverage a Facebook Fan Page 'for free'. However, this does involve direct labor costs, and of course, using social media can be very time consuming. It really depends on what you are using it for. Most companies use Facebook to engage customers and to interact with them; both to drive loyalty and attraction of new clients. These are often existing brands with high brand equity and awareness, where consumers or business entities are already pursuing and 'liking' their pages. If you are a company in the entrance stages, then you should approach an advertising budget not based on a % of sales, but on the ROI. If you plan on running paid ads, select the CPC or cost per click, when you only incur a cost when the user clicks through to your page. If you pay per impression, then you are incurring cost for volume only and not exposure. If you are selling a product online, then you should focus on your budget as a percentage of conversion, or as I mentioned earlier, ROI. If you spend 10 dollars on 5 clicks, and 1 user purchases a $30 dollar product, then you can measure your performance then. The way to make this really work is to find 'high intent to buy' keywords, where if the user clicks on it, they are actually interested in purchasing your product or service. You'll need to take the time to address that carefully. I'd also suggest piloting many version of the same ad at first to see which one performs better. That is..changing the wording etc. In e-mail marketing this is referred to as A/B testing, etc.