As social media continues to grow, it’s about time it gets its own line item on your advertising budget. I’m not saying you need to totally replace other advertising means, but just that you need to trim a small portion off and dedicate it to social media.

As an example, I want to share with you a case study of a Valentine’s Day contest we did with one of our relatively new clients. They decided to invest in a $100 gift card. The basic premise was that people would submit couple pictures to the dealership, we put them in an album and they then had their friends and family like the pictures. The one with the most likes won.

A little about this dealership – they are in the outskirts of Knoxville TN and have a fantastic reputation in the community. At the time, they had about 600 likes on Facebook. The contest lasted a week.

Here are some of the pertinent stats that were gathered from Facebook insights for this contest:

240 new page likes for the week.

5709 people talking about – Number of unique users sharing stories about your page…what makes this stat so important is that it is public information, it displays on the front page of a Facebook page and basically serves as a resounding referral!!!

67962 total reach – Total reach includes the number of unique people who saw any activity from your Page, including posts, posts by other people, Page like ads, mentions and check-ins.

65848 post reach – The number of unique users who saw your Page post.

11317 people engaged – People engaged is the number of unique people who’ve clicked, liked, commented on or shared your Page’s posts.

6570 likes on content.

1363 comments on content.

1105 shares, people sharing our content with their friends.

All in all, I think it was $100 very well spent!!!!