Businesses can pursue social media paid advertising in order to gain a better presence within that social media network, outside of the business’s official page/profile/channel. Let’s focus on paid advertising in Facebook.
To get the obvious out of the way, if you want to advertise in Facebook, your business must first have a Facebook page.
Once your page is created, set-up and optimized, think about a few key items before you pursue Facebook paid advertising. First of all, what do you want to advertise? Do you want to promote your actual business’s Facebook page to generate more fans, or would you like to promote a particular product/service/event from your website? You can certainly promote both avenues to test to see which one has the better overall performance.
Before creating Facebook ads, read the “Facebook Best Advertising Practices” and “Reasons for Rejection” documents. Facebook is very strict in terms of what they’ll allow in the ads (i.e. capitalization, images, etc). Save time and read these documents beforehand in order to reduce rejected ads.
Ads with images tend to have better click-through-rates (CTRs) than ads that do not have images. Facebook CTRs are already very low in comparison to Google AdWords search network ads, however, don’t let CTRs be a main indicator of your campaign’s overall performance. Because Facebook users are not actively searching for a particular business, service or product, the CTR tends to be lower like the Google Content network. That being said, you have the option of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Pay-Per-View (PPV). Because the CTR is so low, choose PPC!
Once the ads are created, check Social Actions. Social Actions draws a connection between a user and the ad, by way of the user’s friends. For example, if your friend Olivia Bolivia became a Fan of Papa John’s Facebook page, you would receive a notification of her becoming a Papa John’s fan in your Facebook news feed. You would also receive Papa John’s suggestions in the righthand column of your Facebook profile and homepage. Here’s an example from my Facebook profile:
Facebook allows its advertisers daily budget options and ad scheduling. The ad scheduling is not as sophisticated as Google’s advanced day-parting, but it does allow advertisers to choose which days they would like their ads to display.
Have you tried Facebook paid advertising? How you would rate your campaign’s performance and experience?
