10 Tips for Advertising on Facebook
Every day, about 200 million people log onto Facebook, spending an average of 14 minutes on the site—adding up to about seven hours per month!
This high number of engaged users represents a huge potential advertising audience for your business. If you choose to tap into this audience, consider following these 10 tips for advertising on Facebook:
- Familiarize yourself with Facebook’s advertising guidelines. Facebook has very strict requirements for the types of ads you can place on its site. For example, ads can’t contain audio that plays automatically; they can’t contain excessive repetition; and they can’t promote “get rich quick” opportunities. Make sure you adhere to these rules or your ad will be rejected.
- Make sure your ad text isn’t annoying. Facebook has a feature that neither Google nor Bing has: You can close ads you don’t like. Just click on the gray box at the top right corner of the ad. Facebook will ask you why didn’t like the ad, and you can offer your feedback. If enough people close the ad it won’t be shown anymore. So if you actually want your ad to last beyond a few days or even a few hours, make sure it’s not too pushy.
- Find a relevant and attractive image for your ad. While ads on the major search engines can’t contain images, Facebook ads allow for one image. When I signed into my Facebook account today, for example, I came across an ad for Caribbean real estate containing a beautiful image of an island surrounded by clear, turquoise water. Be sure to pick an enticing image that highly relates to your product or service. Then you’ll get more qualified clicks.
- Familiarize yourself with the different ways you can target users. With Facebook, you can target people based on many different factors. You can show your ads to people of a certain age, people in a certain city or country, or people who had a certain college major. You can target single people, Republicans, or employees of a specific company. You can also target people based upon their interests, whether it be snake charming, fly fishing, or cross stitching. Determine your target audience, and then advertise to these people alone.
- Determine the main purpose of your advertising campaign. Decide whether your main aim is to have users become familiar with your brand, or to generate leads or sales. If it’s the former, then cost per impression advertising is probably the better option. If it’s the latter, then cost per click advertising is likely your better option.
- If you don’t have a lot of money, don’t spend a lot. You can be a thrifty advertiser with Facebook. According to Facebook’s Help Center, the minimum required daily budget is $1 for both cost per click and cost per impression advertising. The minimum cost per click is 1 cent and the minimum cost per impression is 2 cents. Just keep in mind that if you have a lower budget your ad will be shown less frequently.
- Use Facebook’s bid estimator to help you set your bid. If you really have no idea what bid amount will get your ad a good amount of exposure, take advantage of this tool. While creating your ad, enter your targeting criteria, and then go through to step 4. The bid estimator will show you the range of bids that are winning auctions among ads like yours.
- Make the most of the advertising space you’re allotted. Facebook allows 25 characters for the ad’s title, and 135 characters for the ad’s body. While Google also allows 25 characters for its ads’ titles, it only allows 105 characters for the ad’s body (70 for the ad’s text and 35 for the display URL). So take advantage of Facebook’s extra space by including all the information you think will prompt qualified clicks.
- Monitor your ads’ performance with Facebook’s Ads Manager and Facebook reports. These resources will tell you how many people saw your ads, how many people clicked on them, and your click-through rates. They will also tell you how much you’ve spent, the types of users who have seen your ads, and the types of users who have clicked on your ads. This information shows you which of your ads are successful, and which need improvement. Modify your ad campaign based on this information.
- Check out this Facebook advertising blog for more tips on good Facebook advertising techniques. It contains common Facebook advertising mistakes, information about new Facebook advertising features, and detailed tutorials for advertising on Facebook. This video, for example, takes you through the steps for building a Facebook ad.
YouTube Video Annoutations
YouTube Video Annotations (http://www.youtube.com/t/annotations_about) is a helpful tool for getting the most visibility. YouTube Annotations is a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. You can encourage sharing of content by directly engaging with viewers through either specific calls to action within videos or features like YouTube Annotations. You can use it to add background information, create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene), and link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video.
Mastering Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO): Optimize Your Phrasing.
In order to get people to interact with your Facebook page, you need to treat your posts as part of a conversation. This entails asking questions of your followers and friends. Jeff Widman is CEO of Brand Glue, a consulting company based in Mountain View, California. Widman helps companies, such as the personal finance service Mint, engage Facebook audiences.
“Put the question first, rather than last,” Widman advises clients. “Ask a question where people don’t need to click through a link to give you an answer.”
For instance, one recent Mint post on Facebook read: “Who will you be cheering for during the World Cup? Check out our newest Infographic on the Economics of the World Cup,” followed by a link. The post yielded eight likes and 29 comments, every one listing the name countries people were rooting for. That’s 29 comments more than the post might have received if it simply read: “Check out our newest Infographic on the Economics of the World Cup,” with a link.
Make your questions relatable, and don’t dampen them with industry jargon that the greater Facebook community won’t understand, let alone interact with.
If all your posts are questions, though, your followers might get bored. That’s why another tactic Brand Glue advocates is fill-in-the-blank posts. For instance, Mint posted: “Fill in the blank: I’m saving money to buy ____,” which resulted in 210 comments and 13 likes.
Or, if all else fails, don’t be afraid to ask. Mint put this strategy to good use posting: “Like if you’re graduating this spring or know someone who is. Congrats to all those graduating! Take Charge of Your Student Loans,” which gained 80 likes and several comments.
“Ask for comments and likes,” Widman says. “That’s the immediately actionable strategy.”
Dig Deeper: Facebook’s News Feed Formula
Mastering Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO): Post Multimedia Content
Facebook did not reveal whether or not videos, photos and polls have a greater “edge” than text posts, but experts still say they seem to help increase your EdgeRank.
According to Reggie Bradford, CEO of social media management company Vitrue, which is based in Atlanta, “It gives the consumer the ability to engage with that content. If they watch the video or click on the photo to enlarge it, that’d show up higher on the EdgeRank.”
But just because you’re posting video or photo content, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t offer up a question, too. Amy Marshall, owner of Ohio’s Webbed Marketing says, “Post a photo or video of an advertising campaign, and then say, ‘What are your thoughts?’”
Mint employed this tactic, posting: “Have you tamed your debt demon? Watch the end of our Quest for Credit saga,” followed by a link to the original video.
Dig Deeper: 12 Steps to Improved Social Media Presence
Mastering Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO): Friend, Fan, and Tag Strategically
Before you show up in someone’s news feed, you need to be friends with them or fans of their page (they can be fans of yours too, which we’ll explain below). This means that you need to target specific individuals and businesses to friend and fan. Even if you’ve friended your top clients, you should pay attention to who their friends are and who they interact with on a regular basis. The more you interact with their friends, the more likely you are to show up on their feeds.
“If I represent a hospital, I’d want to fan as many people as I can to get those key players within the community,” Marshall says. “If I’m national, I want national media as my friend and follower. I want to friend partners and alliances. Then see who’s talking. Who are the advocates? Who are the voices for the brand?”
Some will be easy to interact with, but if you’re interested in targeting one demographic that seems unresponsive, you may want to try tagging them in your posts and photos. To tag in a post, put the “@” sign before the person or business’s name, then select the correct name from the drop down menu.
“When you name drop or mention someone, it shows on their profile,” Marshall advises, and the more exposure you get on the walls of key players, the better.
Dig Deeper: Using Social Networking to Drive Your Business
Mastering Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO): Customize Your Pages to Stand Out
If your business has a fan page, it may be worth customizing the welcome page that new users see when they visit the page. “When someone visits your page, you try to convert them to a ‘liker,’” Widman says, so make sure your welcome page is a good representation of your brand.
Customizing a welcome tab isn’t all that easy, though. You’ll need to use Facebook’s Static FBML app, but unless you’re already adept at HTML, it’d be a good idea to enlist the help of a Web developer. There are some video tutorials to help you through the process on YouTube.
You can also enhance your business’s Facebook presence by adding a Like button to your website. The Facebook Developers site offers step-by-step directions on adding Like buttons, but again, it does involve a fair bit of coding. The benefits of adding a Like button to another website, though, is that you may pick up fans who are using your website, but have yet to interact with you on Facebook.
Dig Deeper: How to Get Customers on Facebook and Twitter
Mastering Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO): Pay Attention to Timing
Know who your friends and fans are and when they’re on Facebook. Remember, decay weakens your EdgeRank, so you want to make sure you’re sending posts at the exact moment your followers will see it.
Pay attention to how often you’re posting. As Bradford says: “You don’t want to post so frequently that you’re overdoing it, but you don’t want to post so infrequently that you’re irrelevant.” In general, however, Bradford says the more you post the better, as long as you’re not spamming peoples’ feeds.
Dig Deeper: How to Advertise on Facebook