At what point do I change from a "Community" to "Brand" or "Company" on Facebook?

Topic targeting is a broad way of targeting people who've expressed interest in that topic or "related topic". It's a good option if you want to create awareness, do branding or generate likes. But when your end goal is sales/leads - it's good to go for precise interests as that's like exact match - and it ensures that you're reaching only those people which you're actually targeting - not related ones.

I've been in the picture messaging space for a while now with my apps Lutebox (voted one of London's top ten most loved apps) and now Click Messenger. I've written a few articles about the space including a recent post about the Future of Mobile Messaging. Snapchat started out as an app called Picaboo, which pretty much did what it does now (prior to the latest update with chat and video calling). They quickly rebranded but saw a little uptake in user numbers and had quite low downloads for several months. Then around Christmas 2011 one of the founders' mom had told her friend about the app, who told her kid and her kid basically then spread the word throughout their high school in L.A. That was what really blew up their download numbers as it spread across teenagers at local high schools. As far as I know they didn't advertise in the early days, relied solely on word of mouth. Also it is assumed that they have a solid user base. Comparatively speaking, their user base may be in the low tens of millions, which may a great base of users, but nowhere even close to being as big as Facebook or Twitter. I'd be happy to speak about this in more detail or about the picture messaging landscape and what I believe to be the future of mobile messaging.

I own / operate physical therapy clinics in the Denver Metro area and have been effectively generating leads and generating new patients online for the last 3 years. And the cost of acquisition is surprisingly low (from as little as $0 if you do some of the things in-house to less than $100 for the cost of acquisition). Though I can't say what your results might be - I have had no success with Facebook (ads or landing page) regarding new client acquisition. If you are interested to learn what works for my business, give me a call to discuss.

It can certainly be tough to build up a substantial follower base, starting from nothing or very little, especially if you haven't launched your product yet. But here are a few tactics to help you get in front of more people pre-launch: 1) Start sharing tons of useful content. Before you bother sending people to your Twitter feed or Facebook page, you want to make sure they'll find something valuable once they get there. If you have the time, create original content that ties into your industry, your product, or your company in some way (without directly promoting yourself, though). If you don't have the bandwidth to create your own content, find other articles from bloggers you admire or experts in your industry, and share their content. Just make sure you're putting out information that's highly relevant and valuable to the audience you're trying to attract so you can engage them once they find you. 2) Create conversation. The people who aren't following you yet aren't seeing your tweets, so how do you show them value and get them to discover you? Start a conversation! At Change Collective, we're rolling out our first course on Becoming an Early Riser. So I'll do a Twitter search for "need to wake up earlier" and find a bunch of people who are tweeting about the exact problem we're setting out to solve. By favoriting their tweets or replying with -- "That's great! We think we can help - check out our newest course & let us know what you think!" -- I'm getting our product on their radar and simultaneously providing value to them. 3) Ask for help. Start with your fellow team members, and ask them to share the company's Facebook posts or retweet some of your tweets. You can even create lazy tweets for them to share. What about your board members? Advisors? VCs? They all have a stake in helping your company grow awareness and adoption, so find an easy and appropriate way for them to help by leveraging their networks. And if you have friends and family who are excited about your business and supportive of what you're doing, they probably won't mind a friendly request to help spread the news every once in a while. Hope this helps! I just joined an early-stage startup and I'm currently building up our marketing from scratch. Happy to jump on a call and offer some tips from the trenches if you'd like. Best of luck!

It's actually very smart to do it the way you are doing it. We do this all the time and have tested it extensively. What you want to do is to see if your ad is getting enough "reach" at the 20 cent click level. Reach is the amount of times your ad is shown. If there aren't many others bidding, you can bid pretty low and still get lots of reach. However, if your ad isn't getting shown much, you'll know that you should raise your ad price. Make sure you also test using Optimized CPM versus paying for clicks as well. Hope that helps.