Well that was a waste. $7 down the drain. I wanted to experiment and I guess this was a cheap way to do the experiment. I paid to “Promote” a status update on Facebook. This is only available to personal Facebook accounts, not Facebook pages. It’s a new contraversial way that Facebook is allowing users to advertise without spending a hefty budget or needing to go through what can be a confusing process for advertising campaign creation. With Promote, you just type your status update, post it, and then underneath it click Promote. You pay $7 and allegedly your status update shows up higher in the news feeds of your Facebook friends. It shows as a “Sponsored” story. There is really no way to gauge the ROI (return on investment) or results of the Promote feature because Facebook has not and does not prior to your payment explain what is promised in return for the $7. It was pretty stupid for me, as a skilled business person, to throw away $7 without knowing what I was paying for. But again it was more of an experiment for me and now I know that I won’t utilize this new “feature” in the future.

How do I know it didn’t provide me any results? The status update I “promoted” or “sponsored” was asking my Facebook friends to please like a Facebook page that I support. That Facebook page is giving away $1 for every new like to their Facebook page. The money goes to charity – more specifically the American Red Cross for helping with relief efforts in New Jersey and New York. Previously this page donated $1 per like to the victims fund of a local tragedy here in the Milwaukee area. That was a shooting at a salon & spa in Brookfield, WI called Azana.

Anyway I was watching the likes count of that page in the hours after I paid the $7 and there was only 1 additional like to the page. I also don’t know how many hours the sponsored status update shows at the top of peoples’ news feeds or if it ever even did. That 1 like could have been from somewhere else.

Bottom line, for me, is that if you pay the $7 fee to Facebook for a promoted or sponsored status update you are wasting your money. It seems that this is just an additional revenue stream for Facebook as the sponsored status updates from individuals allegedly show up on mobile devices where traditional Facebook ads do not. If you’ve been following the news you’ve heard that shareholders in Facebook aren’t too happy with the last quarter of Facebook’s revenue and they’re demanding Facebook find a way to capitalize on the mobile traffic the site receives. The number is something like 80% of Facebook traffic comes from mobile devices now.

Have you tried the $7 promoted status update “feature”? Did you see results? Heck did you ever even receive confirmation from any of your friends that your status update did show atop their news feeds?