Advertising on FaceBook

FaceBook is still like the original WWW, or the Wild Wild West. There are lots of gold mines just waiting to be found.

If  you don’t have a Page for your business yet, I highly recommend taking the time to put one up (or hire someone like moi to do it for you:)

Once you have your page to your liking, and have started to fill it up with content, I suggest putting up a FaceBook ad.

In my opinion it’s worth a few hundred bucks over the course of a month or two (or more) to attract people to your FaceBook, blog, and/or website.

IMPORTANT: Remember, FaceBook “Likers” extend your reach way beyond your normal ads (say on Google.) Once a person “Likes” your page, you have the opportunity to reach ALL of their friends with your posts.

Who are “Likers”?
(from the folks at FaceBook)

People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user.

The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They’re also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

As publishers work to identify the best ways to reach a younger, “always on” audience, we’ve found that the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, as reported by the Newspaper Association of America.

So, how do you go about advertising on FaceBook?

It’s actually relatively easy, but like anything else that’s successful – you have to put thought into it!

FaceBook helps you easily pick your audiences for the ad. If you don’t already know, there are over 600 million folks on FaceBook and growing! (It’s much bigger than the Wild Wild West).

FaceBook allows you to show your ads to exactly who you want based on information in a user’s profile (this is information provided BY the user!)

You can easily segment on gender, age, location, relationship status, education level and a number of other fixed parameters, along with thousands of interests and occupations you can target using keywords.

The key to a high CTR (click through rate) is a combination of a powerful image, an engaging headline, and laser-focused targeting. (Having a high CTR, means that a lot of people who see your ad, CLICK on your ad!)

Here’s what you need:

• Text
• Image (required)

Ad Components:

• 110×80 image
• 25 character headline
• 135 characters of body copy

Approval Process is Manual and sometimes slow (although I’ve had my ads approved within hours)

For the headline, the best format is either something so off-the-wall that the reader just has to click to see what on earth you’re talking about… or that old standby, the question format.

You only have 25 characters!

Only use the word “You” if you have to, for instance, in the last example, instead of “Do you want a Virtual House?”, we excluded 6 characters by eliminating “Do you”

Examples:

• “Do YOU Love Your Kids?”
• “Living Your Purpose?”
• “Want a Virtual House?”
• “Fair Trade Stuff to Love”

And then the required image. Here are a couple of ads I found on FaceBook this morning. Keep in mind, I live near Columbus, Ohio so the ads include “Columbus.”

Take a look at this ad. First of all the headline caught my eye “Columbus Bucket List.” I mean, who doesn’t want to create a bucket list?

But, the picture of what appears to be a GIGANTIC fish made me click on it.

And guess what? The ad is for LivingSocial.com. Hmmm, a little tricky me thinks! But if I didn’t know about LivingSocial.com by now, I’m sure I would have signed up on the spot!

And another example:

To be 100% honest, the first thing I noticed about this ad are the freshly baked donuts! You see how my mind works, I’m assuming they’re freshly baked and delicious. (yumm…. can’t you just taste them melting in your mouth right now? I wanted so badly to click on it, but I’m on a diet (I’m not kidding, this is how my mind worked!)

So, the bottom line.

You all have a niche of some kind. And I can guarantee that there are lots of people who are interested in whatever you do or sell.

Use your creativity to create an interesting ad. You can have them directed to your website, your blog or your FaceBook page.

I’d love to hear your success stories, or have you send me great examples of ads you just couldn’t help but click on!

By tekmiss on May 9, 2011   /   Facebook   /   Leave a comment