Advertising on Facebook – 9 Useful Tips
Depending on your budget you can place a good and effective ad in Facebook, but alas! It does not matter at all if you don’t have a huge corporate budget to invest, so no problem. Remember throwing a cost-effective good ad to a reservoir of millions of members, means as a mathematical rule that more than 20% would definitely be aware of your unique selling proposition (USP).
A good advice is when dealing with these social network systems for commercial purposes, is to have a little bit of Marketing knowledge for a better effectiveness. Facebook Marketing strategies and social network trends are constantly changing because of this ever increasing members data base. Facebook has been evolving from a puppy students network system and placing university students targeted banner-ads to a nowadays more huge and every day more complex advertising system.
In its recent past it was a rule to place a network-targeted banner ad, placing social ads is one of the most attractive ways to generate profits and the latest trend. Social ads system is strictly related to a friendlist and it takes into account personal details people put in their profiles, these particular ads can be displayed to segmented groups whether by age, gender, location, language, marital status, likes or dislikes preferences, keywords people put in their profiles and so on and so forth.
A Social Ad is basically a graph with a descriptive text. These appear either in people’s news feeds or Facebook’s Ads space (the lower part of every screen), this will depend on how much you want to pay either to be placed.
Here are some tips for you to place a free social ad, after that you can increase your budget depending on you and your overall campaign:
1 – Click on the Advertise link and click the ‘get started’ tab
2 – Try to define if you want to drive traffic to your website or to a Facebook fan page
3 – Define your target by choosing your preferred audience tab in a demographically basis if you wish
4 – Prepare a good brain-catching text and hire a graph designer for a visual impact graph, when you feel all is OK, upload it. The ad text should not be more than 25 characters concerning the title and 135 body text characters. The image to be uploaded it has to be set to 110 pixels wide x 80 pixels with 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio. File size to be uploaded should not be more than 5 megabytes.
Facebook Social ads does not allow Flash animated graphs although they are working on that, meanwhile you can use external server or applications to keep it in your fan page. Please remember this golden rule: The headline text is more important than image, test more and more this until you are completely satisfied please with your overall CTR.
5 – Define what payment system you wish. You can choose either CPC or CPM
6 – Test your ad for any further error or mistake, once you are sure about all enter your credit card information to formally start your Facebook campaign
7 – Check your daily stats as well as in depth demographics, please always check your impressions and clicks you can do this in the daily stats tab, this can be also displayed as a nice graph form
8 – Remember prices usually come down and down the more people click your ad in a regular CPM and rate basis, therefore tweak and click in order to improve your existing ad campaign a continues better ad click means a constantly lower click costs
9 – If you have a huge budget to spend you can use Facebook Beacon, Sponsored Marketplace listings, Sponsored stores or Sponsored groups. Is good to know that measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign is sometimes hard to track.
There is not a sacred rule to follow however you can track the effectiveness by monitoring your web traffic, by measuring the ROI, by tracking how many contacts or followers are you having so far and very important the public perception and awareness of your brand, service or idea you are promoting or selling.
Facebook Marketing is growing in many countries out of USA, for example in Europe Facebook advertising ads are in a way cheaper than American one, Italy for example is the one leading so far. Those foreign clicks shows a less saturated projection and most of their final users are not just only college students. A constant increase on a demographically basis is touching Facebook, 30 years plus old users are now part of the family, making this business one of the most lucrative one’s.
Remember is always good to start with a small target if you want to experience with this system, after that you can increase your expectations and budget of course.