Sounds like a good beginning - congrats. How many 2 cent clicks does it take you to get a new fan?

Have about a 40% on average fans per click.

When the rate drops to 25 to 30% I pause the campaign for a week or so to keep it fresh.

The rate always goes back up to 40%

About 1000 of the fans are as a result of friends of friends joining when I do my weekly posts.

So that's about 0.05 per new fan? Insanely good!

Here's a benchmark from 5-6 years ago. A Direct Marketing Association survey showed that the cost of new email address acquisitions for in-house lists averaged about $30 per acquisition. That means Facebook marketing just wiped the floor with the old skool approach.

Of course, you still need to make great use of your Fan Page. But you need to make good use of an email list, too - and the overhead in email is a lot more.

Tropical, how did you manage to get decent impressions and clicks at $0.02/click? Can you share over what timeline that took?

I'm having trouble getting any impressions at all at that rate. I have restricted the target audience slightly (adult age, college grad, committed relationship).

Your experiences would help a bunch, thanks!

First of all you have to understand that I live in a South American country where the international tourism is down 75% which was 85% of our guests.

We were forced to appeal more & more to the national market through AdWords which has been successful. The national market is full of problems due to the culture & other things.

When we implemented our FaceBook fan page the idea was to go after the International market however it soon became evident that the costs would be too high - suggested bids in the 25 to 50 cent range or higher which compares to our AW costs which are much more direct & productive.

We decided to redo the ad & appeal to just the national market & 2 neighbouring countries. We put our bid at 10 cents & tried to cover all the key phrases that related to our tourism oriented business on a tropical island & restricted the ad to over 23 years.

The results were fantastic. The average CPC is 2 cents & the fan rate is about 40%. Every time we post an update we get great response.

Unfortunately the national market only vacations during about 12 weeks a year however during the month of August we are booked almost full with nationals for the first time.

Now if I could just figure out a way to rejuvenate the International market. Maybe buy a charter jet & bring them in myself. :-)

How do those fans translate into revenue. Or in other words, how do you monetize a fan base, or is this just for branding?

Innovate, to monetize a fan base I think you have to engage with these fans by posting regular updates to the Page, and then responding to their comments. You post your specials, your new products, contests, etc. Visit some of the Facebook pages for various Las Vegas casinos, they seem to do a good job of reaching out to their fans.

I'm a fan on the Facebook page of one of our local indian casinos, and often times my wife and I will visit them whenever they announce a 3x points day on their Facebook page.

Tedster - in house mailing lists CPA of $30? What report did you get that data from as it's way wrong for what people are paying these days. In most sectors it's well under $1.00.