Target Your Market in the Social Space

If you’ve never heard of Facebook Ads before, it works in a similar way to Google Adwords.

However, there are some key differences in these two methods of online paid advertising. Keep reading to learn more about Facebook Ads for beginners.

How do Facebook Ads work?

Facebook Ads work in a similar way to Google Adwords adverts. You set a daily budget you’re happy with and display your adverts on Facebook as opposed to Google.

The beauty of Facebook Ads is that you can target your audience using a number of different factors such as age, location, gender, interests and more.

You can choose to either pay per click (PPC) as you do on Google Adwords or you can pay per impressions (CPM) whereby your pay a set amount for every 1000 times your advert is displayed, regardless of whether people click on it or not.

How are Facebook Ads different from Google Adwords?

In addition to the increased targeting options, Facebook Ads are different in many other ways, including.

• You can use images in your Facebook Ads
• You have to work harder to gain your target market’s attention – this is because they’re in ‘social’ mode rather than ‘buying’ mode like they are when they search on Google
• You can include a ‘like’ button on your Facebook Ads so people’s friends and family can see when someone ‘likes’ your ad which can help spread the word on Facebook

Do Facebook Ads work well for all types of business?

The answer to this question is no. Facebook is still very much a social sphere and as such business to consumer adverts tend to work much better than business to business ads.

If you’re on Facebook chatting to friends or family, it’s unlikely you’ll be in ‘business mode’ and are therefore more likely to pay attention to adverts that target you as an individual.

How to tweak your Facebook Ads for better results

As mentioned earlier, your advert text will need to be spot on to make people sit up and take notice on Facebook because they’re not on the site specifically to look for products or services.

With Facebook Ads it’s important to change your advert text and images regularly to keep them fresh and give people something new to look at.

Like Google Adwords, Facebook Ads also has a number of useful reporting tools to help you track your results and see where improvements could be made.

Why not give Facebook Ads a try today? Remember you can set your own budget and it could bring you a lot more business.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Guides for Beginners, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.