Advertising on Facebook

How does advertising on Facebook work?

1)    The Like Button

a.     When someone visits your site, they can simply click on the Like button to show they like and support your page. This enables posts from your page to show up on their wall. Also, their friends have the opportunity to see that they liked the page and check it out.

2)    Fan Pages

a.     Fan pages allow you to promote a business, website, cause, place- pretty much anything. To set up a fan page you can just log into your Facebook account and click on the “Account” menu. Then click on “Manage Pages” and Facebook will guide you through the set up process.

b.     Pages can contain a lot of information such as the website URL, address, telephone number, products you sell, photos, news updates, etc. Good fan pages are a great way of attracting attention and visitors to your website.

3)    Facebook Ads

a.     These ads can be clicked on, “liked,” or made to disappear. Facebook ads can be set up as a pay per click or pay per impression, but are different from most PPC ads because they have pictures. It is important to have a good picture as this is what draws the audience in. If you use the pay per click method then the price you pay for your ad will vary based on how successful your ad is and the higher the click through rate, the lower your cost per click.

b.     How does Facebook know what ads might interest me? Well, when you set up an ad in Facebook, you can chose the demographics of the people that you want to show the ad to. The target audience can be narrowed down by age, sex, location, interests, etc. In that way, Facebook ads can be more targeted than Google AdWords or Yahoo Ads.

c.     Before setting up your Facebook Ad make sure you read how the auction for Facebook ads works. Basically, you bid on the ad the amount that you are willing to spend per click or thousand impressions on that ad. A bid range is then suggested based on how much other advertisers are willing to pay for the same target audience. Past performance history of the ad as well as the quality of the ad are also taken into account.

d.     Also Facebook doesn’t allow some types of ads, so be sure to check that your ads follow Facebook’s policies.