I have recently started experimenting with advertisements for Chess tournaments using Facebook and Google. I wanted to share my experience, make some suggestions, and solicit suggestions from others.
First, the good side. It’s cheap. It’s very cheap. My advertising budgets for my ad campaigns have been $1.00 per day. For that, my ad has been placed thousands of times in tightly targeted areas. Second, it’s fun. It’s $1.00 a day, and it’s cool when you get a “click”, or even better when someone “likes” your page. I might run the ads for a week at a time. So, for the cost of lunch at McDonalds, I get a weeks worth of cheap entertainment following my ad statistics.
So does it work? Sort of. The first time I tried it, I did have one person show up at my tournament who had not been to one in many years, but saw my Facebook ad. One guy doesn’t sound like a lot, but mine are small tournaments to begin with. One guy is a measurable percentage, and our tournaments are built one guy at a time.
I would like to see other organizers do this, because I have the feeling that if people were to see advertisments for Chess tournaments, it would help all of us. It would help bring Chess a little bit closer to a mainstream activity. What that means is that your tournament benefits a little bit from my ad, and vice versa. This is especially true on Facebook, where when you “like” someone’s page, that can generate a ripple effect through friend networks. (Of course, all this time youare bbeing coopted into advertising networks,but if you are on Facebook at all, you must realize that there’s no privacy associated with anything you do there. You might as well be coopted into a Chess advertisement as anything else.)
One argument I have heard against it is that “no one looks at those ads anyway.” That’s almost true, but not quite. It’s true that my first Facebook ad campaign had over 60,000 views, and right about 60 clicks. That might seem dismal, but it still means I got a bit of exposure to a very wide audience for a very low price, and at least one person actually came to my tournament as a result.
That’s all for now. If you have questions about my experience or how to go about it, feel free to ask. Meanwhile, if you have suggestions about other ways to use 21st century media to promote Chess tournaments, I’m open to suggestions.