• by Rob Jewell , December 20, 2012

What’s the best way for retailers to engage men? We hear this question often and the answer is always the same—it depends on your goal. 

That said, over the course of the last year, we’ve learned a few tricks, best practices and insights for getting the biggest bang for your buck with men, particularly during the holiday season.

In the spirit of the holiday season, we thought we’d share these best practices and insights with you for better planning of Facebook campaigns in 2013.  

It’s worth noting too that even though Thanksgiving/Black Friday has passed—there's still timely advice here for retailers to employ with upcoming campaigns around any “holiday” where targeting men is critical—i.e., Super Bowl, Father’s Day, etc. 

So without further ado:

1. If your goal is to grow your fan base, Sponsored Page Like Stories are the most consistent way to do that. 
   
   The best time to run your fan acquisition campaign is before the holiday season hits. By significantly growing your fan base prior to the holiday season, you will also have a larger audience with which to drive engagement for your brand.
    
2. If you start growing your fan base before the holidays hit, you will be able to grow a large enough base that you can allocate more of your budget to Page Like Stories and continue acquiring fans for far less cost. 
   
   This is because Page Like Stories do not become inflated in cost as much as Inline Fan ads during the holiday season (they’re a more stable price point), and their conversion rates stay relatively stable.
   
   
3. Because the cost of fan acquisition goes up during the holiday season, running any kind of brand awareness campaign where the goal is to get as many eyes on your ads as possible, use Page Post Ads as the click through rates are higher than any other ad unit (and the cost per click is roughly one-third that of an inline fan).
   
   
4. When using Inline Fan Ads, men are 25% more likely than women to become a fan when they see one. This is in sharp contrast to women, who are much more engaged when they see a Sponsored Story, which means that social endorsement holds a lot more value with women.
   
   
5. If your goal is to get as many clicks as possible (i.e., an announcement for a sale) the biggest bang for your buck are Page Post Stories— they’re consistently the cheapest ad unit (around half the cost of an Inline Fan ad—so you can get twice as many eyes on it), with the highest CTR. 
   
   
6. Page Post ads are also the best strategy to test different types of brand messages and see what grabs people's attention. And then use the best performing Page Post ads targeted at your current fans to drive better engagement.
   
   
7. Page Post ads get steadily cheaper as you get older in the standard age buckets. The older the age group, the higher the CTR, the cheaper the cost of running Page Posts becomes.
   
   But it is worth noting that all men are the same – age doesn’t seem to affect their behavior or engagement characteristics.
   
   
8. Women are far more likely to convert from a Page Like Story in both their News Feed and Mobile Only feed. (+14% conversion rate).
   
   
9. When it comes to retail, men aren’t clickers – women are twice as likely as men to click on a retail ad that they see in their Newsfeed.
   
   
10. Unlike females (for whom the weekend by far works best for conversions), men have high conversion rates that rival weekend percentages during the early part of the week – Monday through Wednesday. So don’t just throttle up budget on the weekends.

These were some of our top suggestions. What are some of your best practices for retailers interested in engaging men?