@personaltouch

Too true, paying for social media advertising does not work well at all most of the time.

I found that even though our store has a large (for this remote area) following, and a lot of shares and likes, it has less than a 5% effect on sales (number of sales not value of sales), (my home grown survey metrics). New customer acquisition is less than one percent. And it appears to rarely cause those who are normally repeat customers to increase their visits.

Announcing a sale does not mean much, announcing a clearance sale up to 80% off is a little better. Strangely enough, announcing either one of those sales as a limited 2 hour window after normal closing time for online FB followers only- works like a customer pied piper.

What makes it really funny is people who come in, make a purchase and confide in us that they do not follow FB but heard about it from a friend ...... they feel so special having put one over on us! People are so strange in their perception of special.

But if you were offering services of some type that was more of a one on one relationship I can see that working better.