18 January 2011
Your current Facebook adverts, pages & groups probably aren't that bad, it’s just that they could be better. When spending money on Facebook advertising, you must monitor your ad spend closely, as the expense can skyrocket and suddenly kill your campaign’s effectiveness. Too many Facebook advertisers are making beginner mistakes that end up making Facebook rich and the marketer broke. Stop making those mistakes! Use these tips below and dramatically increase your Facebook advertising skills.

One of the biggest questions that people ask is how it could be possible for a business to leverage Facebook for the purpose of marketing a product or a service. Here are three of the possible ways for you to advertise your business, product or service through Facebook social networking.

1. Social Ads on Facebook

This is one of the most straight forward ways that you can promote yourself on Facebook. You can use social ads to target people based on a number of different functions including age group, gender and interest for example. By targeting your ads in this manner, you can increase your CTR, which is your click through rate. This will give you more visitors to your site and also an increase in the number of customers that you are able to attract. Make sure to throw a picture up in your ads because ads with images capture more attention and tend to attract more clicks as well.

2. Groups and Pages on Facebook

You can create groups and pages for your business, company or website on Facebook, and then you can get people to become a fan of your page or to join your group. Use the invite function for groups to get all of your friends to join, or tell your friends about your page so that they can become a fan. Both pages and groups are two excellent channels that you can use to gather more potential customers as well as to build more brand awareness on Facebook.

3. Facebook Word of Mouth

Selling to a friend is always going to be easier than selling the same thing to a stranger. You should try to get to know more friends simply because there are so many active users on the Facebook site. Join groups with some kind of relation to your product or your business and socialize with the members of those groups to make new friends and acquaintances. When people get to know your business and begin to really trust it, they will be much more likely to buy from you.

Facebook Ads

Every day, about 200 million people log onto Facebook, spending an average of 14 minutes on the site— adding up to about seven hours per month!

This high number of engaged users represents a huge potential advertising audience for your business. If you choose to tap into this audience, consider following these 10 tips for advertising on Facebook:

Ad Text

Make sure your ad text isn’t annoying. Facebook has a feature that neither Google nor Bing has: You can close ads you don’t like. Just click on the gray box at the top right corner of the ad. Facebook will ask you why didn’t like the ad, and you can offer your feedback. If enough people close the ad it won’t be shown anymore. So if you actually want your ad to last beyond a few days or even a few hours, make sure it’s not too pushy.

Images

Find a relevant and attractive image for your ad. While ads on the major search engines can’t contain images, Facebook ads allow for one image. When I signed into my Facebook account today, for example, I came across an ad for Caribbean real estate containing a beautiful image of an island surrounded by clear, turquoise water. Be sure to pick an enticing image that highly relates to your product or service. Then you’ll get more qualified clicks.

Targeting

Familiarize yourself with the different ways you can target users. With Facebook, you can target people based on many different factors. You can show your ads to people of a certain age, people in a certain city or country, or people who had a certain job. You can target single people, demographics, or employees of a specific company. You can also target people based upon their interests, whether it be cross knitting, fly fishing, or snowboarding. Determine your target audience, and then advertise to these people alone.

Purpose

Determine the main purpose of your advertising campaign. Decide whether your main aim is to have users become familiar with your brand, or to generate leads or sales. If it’s the former, then cost per impression advertising is probably the better option. If it’s the latter, then cost per click advertising is likely your better option.

Pricing

Use Facebook’s bid estimator to help you set your bid. If you really have no idea what bid amount will get your ad a good amount of exposure, take advantage of this tool. While creating your ad, enter your targeting criteria, and then go through to step 4. The bid estimator will show you the range of bids that are winning auctions among ads like yours.

Copy space

Make the most of the advertising space you’re allotted. Facebook allows 25 characters for the ad’s title, and 135 characters for the ad’s body. While Google also allows 25 characters for its ads’ titles, it only allows 105 characters for the ad’s body (70 for the ad’s text and 35 for the display URL). So take advantage of Facebook’s extra space by including all the information you think will prompt qualified clicks.

Monitoring

Monitor your ads’ performance with Facebook’s Ads Manager and Facebook reports. These resources will tell you how many people saw your ads, how many people clicked on them, and your click-through rates. They will also tell you how much you’ve spent, the types of users who have seen your ads, and the types of users who have clicked on your ads. This information shows you which of your ads are successful, and which need improvement. Modify your ad campaign based on this information.