advertising with Facebook - Have you tried

Have you tried advertising with Facebook

If you’re using Facebook to market your small business, you might want to take a look at advertising on Facebook. There are a number of ways to use ads to drive traffic and build awareness on Facebook.
When you create an ad event on Facebook, you can easily create an ad to promote the event. When people view your ad, they can click on the RSVP link (or anywhere on the ad) and get taken directly to your event page. Even better, if someone RSVPs to your event, it will automatically be added to their profile page and possibly even in their friends’ home page Highlights—generating free distribution for you.
The same is true of your Fan page. You can promote your Fan page with an ad and people have the option of becoming a fan. Even better – Facebook ads allow for “social proof”. If I become a fan of your page, I’ll show up at the bottom of the ad whenever any of my friends view your ad, thus giving you increased credibility with my friends.
You can also use ads to link to your website, but you miss out on the social proof options if you do.
Other types of Facebook ads include videos, Facebook gift ads and their own house ads promoting Facebook features.

Keys to success with Facebook advertising:

Target Your Ads

The best part about Facebook advertising is you can decide the age, gender, location, marital status, interests, and other keywords of who will see your ad. This way you don’t waste money on people who aren’t your target market.

Images attract attention

Studies show the image you use in your ad plays a big part in how many people actually click on it. Therefore, spend some time to choose an eye-catching image to draw people in. Don’t use your logo. Choose something more interesting. Even a photo of yourself will be more effective than a logo. In fact, when I’ve run Facebook campaigns targeting a local demographic I’ve had good success with my photo. People who know me want to see what I’m up to.

Test. Test. Test.

Rather than running a single advertisement, create several ads and change the parameters (called split testing). Try using identical images and demographics but test different photos. Or use the identical ad and test who responds better: men or women. You may also notice you get different results on different days of the week.
You may be surprised at what works. The image below is a chart of a few ads I ran earlier in the year. The last two ads were identical except for the headline. If you’ d asked me before I ran the two ads, I would have guessed that the bottom ad would have performed better.

Monitor results

When it comes to Facebook advertising, don’t just “set it and forget it”. Particularly if you are testing two or more ads, you should log into your advertising account daily until you get a handle on what works. If you notice one ad is out performing the others by a long way, you may decide to discontinue other ads and have more emphasis on the better one.

Final thoughts

The nice thing about advertising on Facebook is you can experiment and get results for much less money than with Google Adwords.
I have heard some experts complain that the click through rates (the number of people who actually click on your ads) are terribly low on Facebook as compared to Google. However, I have a theory. If you have a national (or international) audience or are in a major city the click through rates will be much lower than if you are in a small market and a targeting a local audience. For example, I live in Owen Sound, with a population of about 22,000. Whenever I see an ad on Facebook that has a local town in the title, I’m much more likely to check it out.

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Truth in Blogging

 

 

Writing a blog has been an interesting experience. While I often include my own personal thoughts and opinions, I also try to include useful information paired with hard data. As a result, when I come across an interesting statistic or a quote by an industry leader, I try to include it in my blog post (complete with a link). This habit comes from my journalism training. Plus I hope it makes the articles more interesting and useful.
The other day I came across a link to an interesting blog post that included a very startling “fact” about social media use by small businesses. It said that 65 percent of small businesses don’t use social media at all. Naturally I clicked the link to the article. It repeated the startling fact and included links to the sources for the statistic. Because I wanted to know more, I clicked the links.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of the links wasn’t valid and the other link went to a study that didn’t include the statistic mentioned. In fact, the data mentioned on the study could be interpreted to mean the exact opposite of what was quoted in the blog post. It mentioned that 64 percent of small businesses use social media for answering customer questions. No mention at all of businesses not using social media.
This misrepresentation of the data left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Rather than adding this blogger to my RSS reader and quoting him in this blog, I’ll never trust what he has to say again. By fiddling with the data to create a catchy headline, he lost a reader forever.
I’m all for using surprising or startling facts in your blog posts or headlines. They make for interesting reading. Just make sure that the “facts” are true. Otherwise, you’ll lose me as a reader, customer and referrer.

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