I think Facebook Advertising is one the best ways for you to 1. Build your Facebook Community 2. Get more leads 3. Gain more visibility. However, to be successful, there are a few things you need to know!
It all comes down to one word, targeting. You can run anything as a Facebook Ad and you will get lots of clicks, and even some new page likes, but they won’t be from people who care about your business. They’ll be spammers or people who do not make up your target market. How can you ensure that your Facebook Ads are being seen by the target audience for your business?
First, you need to determine which type of Facebook Ad you would like to use. Below are targeting options that pertain to all 3 types of Facebook Ads, but I’m going to focus on Sponsored Post Ads, in other words, a published post on your timeline converted to an advertisement.
Geographic Location: You can target your advertisement to people who live in a certain country, state, city or zip code. You can also check a box to include cities near that location within a 10, 25 or 50 radius.
Age: There’s no need to show your ad to people who are 13 years old and older if your target audience is retirees. Select the age range that is most appropriate for your business and the content you are promoting.
Gender: Is your target market mostly men or women? Or, is your target market men, but women also contribute to the buying decision? You can select them both or just one.
Interests: This is what I consider the “gold” of Facebook Advertising. You can select certain interests to ensure that your ad is placed in front of the right audience. For example, if your target market is stay-at-home moms, you can target your ad to Parenting, Family, Kids, Kid Activities, etc.
Connections: You can show your ad to anyone, people who already like your page, or people who do not yet like your page. However, the “platinum,” is friends of connections. By selecting this option your ads will show to friends of your existing fans (those who already like your page). The great thing about this is that your ad will show with the viewer’s friends name in it. For example, my Facebook friends would see “Jenny likes Engage121″ or “Jenny likes New Blog Post by Engage121.” See the potential? We know everyone values their friend’s input, especially when it comes to buying decisions.
Advanced Targeting: If you’re not socially savvy, you can skip this paragraph. I’m just kidding! The one targeting option here that you should select is language. If you’re advertising in the United States select English (US), or if you’re targeting other ethnicities add Spanish to your selections or whichever language reflects your audience.
Budget & Time Frame: Lastly is the budget you set for your ad or campaign. You can run a Facebook Ad for as little as $5/day. You can also say you want to spend$50 on the ad, which wouldn’t require you to set a daily limit. There are other conversion options, but I’m going to keep it simple for now. Comment below if you’d like to get techy with me.
Why do you need to do all of this work? By targeting your ad you will ensure that those clicks you’re receiving aren’t from spammers. How? Because spammers on Facebook do not fill out their profile and so there is no data such as age, gender or interests associated with their profiles.
I previously wrote a blog post on How to Get Results with Facebook Ads for SpinSucks, which outlines the return I received from using Facebook Ads. There are some additional points in that article that I think you would find helpful.
Have you ventured into Social Advertising yet? Or are you still skeptical?
3. Be consistent: Like any social network you need to be consistent with your publishing, and with Twitter it’s has to be more frequent. It will be hard to gain new followers if they look at your feed and you haven’t tweeted in 2 months.
