We love to hate Facebook, but the truth is, they do a pretty good job of optimizing user experience while providing a very affordable and effective marketing tool for marketers. As they continue to refine their algorithm to manage users feeds we’re seeing smaller numbers of views and interactions from our page posts. You can do your best to stay in front of your followers by posting regularly and encourage engagement by asking questions and providing value to your followers. To increase your follower count and make lot of new impressions you should consider advertising on Facebook. Here are a few reasons I love advertising on Facebook.
- It’s cheap! On Facebook you can direct people to your Facebook page (or event or a specific post) or to your Website. You can choose to pay per-click or pay by the thousands of impressions. Either way lots of people see your ad and you end up paying pennies per impression. I’ve run campaigns for several different kinds of clients with different goals and different targets. Although cost per page like is not a metric by which you can bid, the performance analytics do show you this. I’ve seen costs per page like between $.40 and $6.00. Of course, the uniqueness of your target and the level of interest in your product or message will affect your results. Most small businesses targeting a geographic area can see results from as little as $50 per month.
- You can target very specifically. The targeting options are expansive on Facebook. You can target by any demographic that users share in their profile. This includes your standard gender, age, zip code, education, family status and more. Beyond that you can target by interest, this goes beyond just what users have shared in their profile, but also includes interest categories based on other pages the users follow. Facebook makes it easy for us by returning suggestions when we type in keywords. For example, if you enter a keyword like “photography” in the interest targeting section it will return suggestions like “digital photography”, “wedding photograph”, ” glamour photography”, “portrait photography”, etc. With targeting this specific it’s easy to know your advertising dollars are being directed to your most likely prospects.
- You can monitor performance. The analytics available in the advertising module are nothing short of amazing. At any time you can look at your ad manager and see stats like number of new page likes, average cost per page like, number of people reached, average number of times each person saw the ad (frequency), number of people who clicked through on the ad, a click-through-rate, average price per 1,000 impressions, and the total spent in the campaign to date. All this makes it easy to see how well your advertising is working and which pieces of ad copy are performing the best.
- It’s flexible.If you’re used to traditional media – where you invest a lot of money, submit one or two pieces of ad copy and then sit and wait with your fingers crossed – this will blow your mind. You can schedule as many pieces of ad copy as you like – each targeted to different users if you like – and you can monitor the analytics in real-time and adjust them as needed. You can pull any ad any time you like – immediately. This is handy if you sell out of your product or if the ad isn’t performing the way you like. This makes the risk minimal. Often it’s unnecessary to make adjustments because Facebook optimizes by running the ads that are performing the best more often.
- It’s easy. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to put together an ad. All you need is an image that represents your business or your product. You’re only allowed 25 characters for a headline and 90 characters for the body in an ad so you need to be pretty good at getting your point across and writing a message that is going to trigger action. This is where the flexibility, affordability and analytics are important. You can afford to try several versions of an ad and monitor the performance to see what works best.
- Once you get a page like you can communicate with them going forward for free. Whether you end up paying $.40 or $6.00 for a page like, you have these users as followers going forward. You know they’re in your target because you choose who was going to see the ad and they would not have liked your page if they weren’t somewhat interested (people don’t like to clutter their feed with posts they don’t want to read.) If you post regularly on your page and provide value to your readers – either in the form of education, information, entertainment or offers – they’re going to stick with you.
If you’ve set up a Facebook page and feel like it’s a waste of time posting on it because you have no followers, you should consider investing a little cash in an advertising campaign. If you’d like to try it and want some expert assistance to get it set up or would like someone to manage a campaign for you, give me a call. I love this stuff and I love helping businesses realize the power of social media.
Have you tried Facebook advertising? How has it worked for you?
