Aug 13
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Facebook is being written about as a marketing nirvana. It is the largest collection of social connections on the planet, with a user base of 1.11billion people. If Facebook were a nation, it would be the third largest on Earth after China and India. Your customers are Facebook users. They post pictures and share their lives with huge groupings of friends, contacts, acquaintances and colleagues. All you have to do to reach them is be on Facebook with them, right?
That might have been the case before Mark Zuckerberg took Facebook public. Now Facebook needs to make a profit and keep its investors happy. One way they do that is by dialing down the communications fire-hose to a tiny trickle for brands wanting to market to Facebook users. Facebook has found ways of charging advertisers who want to take advantage of Facebook’s communication capacities.
The gold mine of Facebook is the user information freely shared by users day in day out. They are constantly telling Facebook what they like and what they don’t like by the way they interact with the site. This information is then parsed and packaged into targeting data that marketers cannot resist. But in order to reach the laser targeted segments most likely to convert on your pitch, you have to pay up.
To make absolutely certain that businesses will move toward paid promotion on Facebook, the news feed algorithm has been updated to levels of sophistication rivaling Google. On average, only about 15% of your brand’s Facebook fans ever see your posts in their newsfeed. Of that 15%, an even smaller portion are likely to engage and amplify your content. So much for going viral, right?
That’s only if you continue to rely on strictly organic activity on Facebook. As soon as you begin investing money in the process, the game quickly changes.
There are two basic options when it comes to boosting your brand’s visibility on Facebook, promoted posts and ads. Let’s take a look at the various options, and the benefits of making use of these paid units.
Promoted Posts
Promoted posts are exactly what the name implies. Spend a little money to increase the visibility of something you’ve already shared with the Facebook community on the time line of your business page. It is by far the easiest paid unit to use. Simply hover over the “Boost Post” option of any post on your timeline to get started.
For just a little cash and a couple of clicks, you can boost the visibility of anything you’ve posted on Facebook to reach more of your fans, their friends, or target basic groups based on location, age, gender, and/or language.
The benefits of Promoted Posts:
- Ease of use
- Low budget
- Greater reach of a post within the community you’ve already cultivated.
For any brand actively using Facebook for content distribution, this option is a must. You can’t get your content into the news feeds of enough people for any real amplification without it.
But the REAL magic of Facebook advertising happens when you take the dive into the deep end of the paid pool.
Example of Right Hand Ad
Facebook Ads
The ad units on Facebook come in 3 basic flavors:
Right Hand Ads
Right hand ads are the ads we are most familiar with, running along the right hand margin of the News Feed and on the photos or videos we open in the Facebook viewer. These are only visible on the desktop version of Facebook.
News Feed Ads
Example of News Feed Ad
A news feed ad runs in the news feeds of targeted Facebook users just like any other post on the network. It is the only type of ad that appears in the mobile Facebook space.
Sponsored Stories
Sponsored stories are an add-on that Facebook produces along with your ad. It displays user activity to their friends. For example, the screenshot below is a sponsored like story that would be presented to my friends showing them that I like the Search News Central blog on Facebook. These stories can be generated anytime one of your fans likes or comments on your content while you are running an ad campaign.
Example of a Sponsored Story
The benefits of Facebook Ads:
- Persona specific targeting based on demographic, geographic, and psychograpic factors
- Ability to send the target of a specific ad to a landing page outside of Facebook crafted specifically for that target group
- Ability to reach the vast segment of the Facebook audience that uses the network almost exclusively via mobile
- Click-through and converstion rates that lead to real revenue for the Facebook effort
- Rich performance data on your ad campaigns
Take a look at the difference Facebook ads are making for brands as reported by
Next week we will take a look at the paid promotional options offered by Twitter. If you have any questions or you would like someone to review your branded Facebook presence, please feel free to contact us.
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Jim Hedger
Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.
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