Marketing with Social Media

There are over 600 million Facebook users and the site is growing. Your market demographic is on Facebook, but you have to know what you are doing to find them.

Facebook has an advertising platform ready for online marketers. Using this tool you can place small display type ads in the right sidebar of Facebook pages and profiles. So far, it hasn't been as effective in pure response as a carefully targeted Google AdWords campaign, but since it’s not the same kind of medium and there aren't any AdWords in Facebook it's still well worth the investment.

In Facebook, getting your campaign up and running isn’t as intuitive as it could be. Below are a few things to keep in mind while you explore Facebook advertising and plan a campaign.

Target

Facebook advertising allows you to select who sees your ad using a number of variables, including keywords. You can target by geography, age, gender, education, relationship status, and workplace in addition to keywords. Aim for the same demographics on Facebook as you would with other marketing mediums. The real trick is choosing your keywords so that you have a large enough audience to get the job done. This is getting easier as they continue to build a more robust analytics package.

Attract and Engage

Once you have an audience you must decide whether to direct them to your website outside of Facebook, or if you are going to set up something on Facebook like a Page, Application, Group or Event. If you are already the administrator of your Facebook Page, Group, Event, or Application, you can select it from the drop down option. The thing that’s nice about using ads to promote your pages and events is that Facebook puts a “Become a fan” or “RSVP to this event” button right in the ad. People don’t even have to visit your page to take action. There are benefits to sending them to your web site but by sending them to assets on Facebook you have benefit from user actions on the social wall that occur when someone RSVPs to an event. Not only have they created activity on your page, all their followers automatically see that action.

Facebook ads are small. Use your space wisely. Your headline (25 characters) should grab attention immediately. The body of the ad has only 135 characters to describe and entice readers. You have the option to upload an image. Use this option. Images draw the eye, it may be the most important aspect of your ad. Take your time and find the perfect image. Its a fact that Facebook users are very image driven (it’s the largest photo sharing site in the world) and the visual graphic you choose will make or break an ad.

Budget

Facebook advertising works a bit like AdWords in that you bid for keywords and compete to get your ads shown. How effective this is depends upon the competitiveness of your keywords. You can choose between a cost per click (CPC) model where you pay only for clicks or a cost per thousand (CPM) model where you pay per 1000 ad views.

To start your campaign you must determine a bid per click and daily budget. You can set both of these numbers very low, but don’t expect much. Initially you are just testing so you’ll want to set your click bid somewhere around the Facebook suggested amount and a daily budget you can live with, something like $50 or more to start. Once you have a system worked out you can adjust these as needed.