Viral Storytelling: Rinnai Increases Engagement with Facebook Sponsored Stories

Quality trumps quantity when adding Facebook fans who are more likely to be potential buyers.

Most companies are seeking to grow their fan base, but what is the best strategy for increasing fans while capturing ROI in the social market?

Rinnai, the number North American seller of tankless water heaters, decided to find out by leveraging Facebook Sponsored Stories with the guidance of Sherpa! Web Studios. The manufacturer sought to overcome the issue facing all business pages — less than 10% of Facebook fans see posts — while also pursuing a savvy and focused paid search strategy.

Facebook Sponsored Stories

Sponsored Stories are types of display ads that promote social connections and actions people make with a Page or Event.

The ads convey how fans interact with a page to that fan’s friends along with linked content. Their name, interest, and behavior provides a tacit recommendation to follow the ad.

Page administrators may target who sees Sponsored Stories, including location, gender, age, likes and interests, relationship status, workplace, and education of target audience. Current fans and friends of fan can also be targeted.

Sponsored Stories Strategy

Based on the results of a trial experiment, Rinnai dedicated a modest daily budget to Facebook Sponsored Stories as part of overall paid search strategy.

The following tactics were implemented for creating compelling ads on the Rinnai Tankless Facebook page:

• Update fan page with up to three unique updates per week
• Add link to unique web content in every update
• Craft first 90 characters of each post as new Sponsored Stories ad
• Emphasize call to action for increased visibility: liking, sharing, commenting

Sponsored Stories Results

During the first month of the client’s paid search campaign, Sponsored Stories performed remarkably compared to paid search campaigns on Google and Yahoo!/Bing:

• Sponsored Stories had a remarkable 208,000 impressions — the second highest volume of all optimized paid search campaigns during the same period
• Of those, 2,640 resulted in clicks to visit website content
• Average cost per click was $0.52; search engine cost per clicks ranged from $3 to $7
• Traffic from Sponsored Stories had the lowest cost per conversion and the second lowest cost per opportunity of all optimized campaigns

Looking to increase your Facebook engagement with the scope of an all-encompassing, optimized PPC strategy? Contact Sherpa! to develop a plan.