Recently, Facebook has made major changes to the way business fan pages are created and shown. This change called “timelines” allows you more web page real estate on your fan page.
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Before this change you could only show an image that was only about half of the width of your webpage. This was extremely limiting to your viewers and fans.
For this reason, most Facebook advertisers sent people who clicked their ads to their websites instead of their Facebook page, depriving Facebook of the opportunity to show more ads to their viewers and generate more revenue.
Since Facebook’s goal was to keep you on their pages longer, their solution was to provide you with more of a webpage like experience with the hope that their advertisers would send people back to their fan pages instead of their websites. Timelines accomplishes this very well.
With Timelines, you can now show full size videos and images. You can read text with having to use scroll bars. You can sell your products or services directly from Facebook. You can collect email addresses. Ultimately, you can do just about anything with your Facebook page that you can do with your website.
Since a viewer is more like to stay and look around on your Facebook page than your website when they click an ad, why would you still send them to your website?
Since it’s always been and still is cheaper per click to send your viewer to your Facebook page instead of your website, why would you send them to your website?
Now is the time to reconsider how you do your Facebook advertising.
OK, if you can now provide a great experience to your viewers, how do you take advantage of it using Facebook Ads?
Here’s a quick primer on Facebook Advertising.
Ad creation
Ads can be created from your admin panel using simple text or text and a picture. Pictures always improve click throughs, so always use a picture.
Audience Targeting
For me, the biggest advantage Facebook advertising has is that is allows you to target by interest. When you fill out your personal Facebook profile and include your interest, Facebook uses that information to show you very specific ads.
Let’s say you were selling video wine tasting classes. You could specifically target people who have entered “wine drinkers” on their profiles. You could get even more detailed. You could target people who have entered learning about wine or even wine classes. Do you think you would get more of a specific audience than with just wine drinkers? Sure you would.
Then you could target by region or even drill down to zip code. You could target by age, gender, language and so on.
You could even target specific fans of another wine fan page!!
There is no other medium in the world that lets you get as specific of an audience as facebook advertising.
CPC
CPC means cost per click. After you have targeted your audience and set up your ads, the goal is to have your ad clicked. The beauty here is that you only pay if your ad is clicked
Ad Costs
Ok, so what does each click cost? That depends on several factors. One is the quality in which you chose your audience. If you chose well, you will get a higher click through rate. A higher click through rate will mean a lower cost per click than similar ads from your competition.
You’re actually rewarded for your competence! What a concept.
Another thing to consider with Facebook advertising is the market you’re in. The more competitive the market, the higher the cost per click. CPC ranges from a few cents per click to several dollars.
Campaign Management
So the next question is can you do this yourself or should you bring in a professional to manage your campaigns?
You can certainly do this yourself. It is easy enough to set up your campaign and get it started. Many people do this and some are actually successful. However, the time and skill to manage the campaign can be difficult for some business owners.
The value in using professional management is in the target audience selection and experience in managing the campaign. An effective manager should not only provide research on whom to target, but be able to lower your cost per click. For some people the biggest advantage is to free up your time by managing the day to day activities.
By using a professional manager, your chances of a successful campaign increase dramatically.
Well, that concludes this article and I hope this quick overview on Facebook Advertising has been helpful.
If you would like to learn more about creating a Facebook ad campaign or other ways to market your business online, click here to schedule an appointment to talk about your business.