Advertising on Facebook

A recent Pew Research study reported that 41 percent of Americans have a social networking profile (like Facebook or Twitter). I’m sure it’s easy to believe that among those aged 18-29, 75 percent have profiles. But would you be surprised to know that 50 percent of those aged 30-45 and 30 percent of those aged 46-64 also have profiles?

Does your average customer fall into one of these groups? If so, advertising your business on Facebook is probably a good idea. Fortunately, advertising on Facebook is not difficult or expensive.

1. Facebook will walk you through the process of designing your ad. You can upload a (tiny) photo or logo, and you can use a couple sentences to entice customers. You can link the ad to your Facebook profile or your website.

• From the image on the right, you can see most Facebook ads are national ads — very generic. You can see why an ad that mentions a Facebooker’s hometown or state would really catch your eye.
• If your company logo is well-known, it’s a good idea to use it as the ad’s image. It’s also an eye-catcher.
• A catchy ad title is also important. And I like to pose a question:  “Garage Getting Full?” or “Running Out of Space?”
• If you’re already on Facebook, check out other ads to see what might work for your company — and what definitely wouldn’t.
• This is a good place to advertise a special you’ve got going on. “Mention Facebook and get two free features!”

2. Next, you’ll use criteria to narrow down who will see your ad.

• You can advertise to people based on their location, age, gender, education, etc.
• For example, maybe you want people between the age of 46 and 64 who live within 50 miles of Longview, Texas. Facebook gives you estimates: This would reach up to 18,180 people. Expanding the criteria to ages 18-64 will reach approximately 66,560.
• My recommendation is to not limit your criteria by much. Setting a location near you and looking for customers over 18 is a good idea.

3. Then Facebook asks you to name your ad campaign, set a daily budget and choose a schedule for your campaign.

• If you don’t want to spend more than $10 a day, you don’t have to!
• You set your account to be charged per impression (when someone sees your ad on the side of their Facebook pages) or per click (when someone actually clicks your ad to get more information). My recommendation is Pay per Click — you’ll get “impressions” for free.
• I chose to run my first Facebook ad for a month. That turned out to be far too long. But running an ad for about 10-14 days turned out to be just right.

4. All that’s left is to review your ad and place your order. You can click here to start advertising on Facebook or to learn more. Once your ad is running, you can check back to see how your ad is performing. I enjoyed checking it each day to see how many clicks we’d gotten.

Have you advertised on Facebook? If so, what advice do you have? If not, what concerns do you have?