Galaxy Ninja

Facebook is huge. How huge? Well, Facebook boasts over 500 million active users – more than half of which will log on during any given day. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, Facebook is now the world’s largest social network, and the second most popular website on the planet.If you’ve got a Facebook account, you will have seen Facebook ads - they appear in a column to the right-hand side of the page. Each ad has a small photo, followed by a few short lines of text. For the right business, advertising on Facebook provides a great opportunity to reach a very targeted audience in a cost-effective way. So, how do you know if Facebook advertising is right for you?

HOW DOES FACEBOOK ADVRTISING WORK, AND IS IT RIGHT FOR ME?

The beauty of Facebook advertising is that you can target your ads based on just about any information a user has given in their profile – age, gender, location, and perhaps most importantly, interests. If your business relates to a particular interest or hobby, it’s often a great candidate for Facebook advertising. To give an example, the site I recently did for Sydney Meditation Centre is a perfect candidate – we target our ads to people living in Sydney, who have listed things like “meditation”, “yoga”, or “spirituality” in their interests. On the other hand, the site I recently did for Evolution Orthodontics, Blacktown is not a good candidate – no one lists “going to the dentist” in their interests! This kind of a site would be better promoted through something like Google Adwords, which allows you to target your ads to people searching Google for a specific term – “dentists in Sydney” or “Sydney orthodontists” in this case.

Below is a list of targeting options for Facebook ads, and in short, if you can identify your target audience based on any combination of these factors, then Facebook advertising is worthwhile considering.

Targeting options: - Location (Country, State, City) - Age range - Gender - Interested in (men/women/both) - Relationship status - Languages - Likes and interests (particularly important!) - Education (all / university graduates / university students / secondary students) & Workplace - Connections (which Facebook pages users are / aren’t connected to) - Friends of connections (eg, you can target users who’s friends are connected to your Facebook page)

Having decided to try Facebook advertising out, creating the ad is easy… we won’t cover it in detail here, but it’s as simple as going to the Facebook Ads page, and following their step-by-step instructions.

WHAT SHOULD I ADVERTISE - MY FACEBOOK PAGE, OR MY WEBSITE?

Note: If you don’t already have a Facebook page for your business, you can create one here. It’s easy, and best of all, it’s free! When someone clicks on your Facebook ad, that click can either:

a) Subsribe that user to your Facebook page, so that user will see your business’ future status updates on his or her own Facebook wall. b) Take that user to your website (which will open up in a new tab or window)

Both strategies have their advantages…

Advertising your Facebook page: Users will be subscribed to your Facebook page, and will therefore see your future updates. This is great, because it means they will be repeatedly exposed to your business through Facebook. In a sense, it’s like they’re allowing you to “advertise” (in a respectful way) to them, for free, through Facebook. This is good long-term strategy for creating brand awareness, but is not necessarily going to lead to a short-term sale. If you choose this strategy, make sure you update your Facebook page regularly with interesting, useful content – avoid being opportunistic or spammy.

Advertising your website: Users visiting your own website are more likely to convert into immediate sales that users who visit your Facebook page – but unlike advertising your Facebook page, that one visit to your site is all you get for each click. You don’t get the opportunity for repeated exposure.

There’s no clear answer as to which is better. Personally, I like to use both methods at the same time – but if I really had to pick one, I think I’d go for the longer-term benefits of advertising my Facebook page. To do this, when creating your advert, simply click the “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook” link, which is directly below the “Destination URL” field – you can’t miss it!

This guest post was written by Joss Palling. To write for us, click here!

Filed under: Facebook by Joss Palling