subject: Are You Selling Yourself On Facebook? [print this page] When your brand becomes the topic of everyday conversation, there must be something which you will be doing right. When this phenomenon is shown by over 400 million people all over the globe who eagerly become your brand ambassadors, then youre surely headed in the right direction. These people would actively engage themselves in regular conversations about everything you do. What a luxury to have! The Gran-Daddy of all social networking sites, FaceBook, is enjoying this success today. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of FaceBook has created a social networking platform that has taken the world imagination by storm.
Companies the world over are further making this SNS (Social networking site) a platform for promoting their brand and reaching their probable customers for maximum engagement.
Now one thing that is missing in these conversations being carried out by FaceBook users is the kind of activity that brands undertake on the website. Examples of great brand campaigns on FaceBook are few and far between as awareness about the same fails to reach the users. Companies try to maximize their reach by creating Fan pages, Communities and what not. But still are left gasping for air with the lack of people showing actual interest in their SNS activities. To broaden the level of user engagement on Facebook, companies follow the time-tested way of advertising. The FaceBook advertising mechanism offers simple yet highly effective advertising programs.
The process that involves the creation of an ad on FaceBook is fairly simple one and involves the following steps:-
Select your Audience
The highly customized format of FaceBook advertising allows you to choose from a host of options that help you decide the kind of audience your ads would be displayed to. The process also allows you to select who sees your ad using a number of variables, including keywords. Target audience can be filtered using variables such as geography, age, gender, education, relationship status, workplace and keywords. Amazingly FaceBook ad mechanism can be narrowed down to the view of a single individual. As you broaden or narrow down your variables, FaceBook shows the number of people your ad would be targeting.
The Landing page
Of the few things that could make or break your FaceBook advertising campaign, one would be the landing page. Would the user be directed to your website or your FaceBook page, event, group or application? What is even better is that FaceBook provides the option of having buttons like a Become a fan or RSVP to this event right in the ad. This helps in the promotion of your page or event. A simple click on either of these would send the link for the same on your faceBook wall enabling the whole of your friends list to view the same.
One should remember that the primary motive of a FaceBook ad should be create a deeper level of engagement of the users. This because once you have attracted the user onto your page or group or website, you would try to build the trust of the user in your brand and finally be able to sell.
Ad Specs
FaceBook advertising offers very limited ad space and therefore should be used wisely. The headline with a maximum character limit of 25 characters should be catchy and attractive. This followed by the Description (135 characters) of the ad i.e the body. The most significant part of the ad is the image. FaceBook in itself is an image driven website (its the largest photo sharing site in the world) and therefore choosing the right image for your ad is of critical value.
Budget
Facebook advertising offers keywords bidding system and you can choose between the regular cost per click (CPC) model or a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model. A daily budget needs to be put into place and one shouldnt expect to be bang-on with the ads right in the first go. Start slowly and then build up for a bigger chunk of the ad-pie. Testing your advertising is always a very recommendable option as you can create multiple ad versions to choose the right ad option over a short period of time. Your maximum focus should be on the image of the ad, which should be constantly changed to know which image gave you the maximum output.
Keep the above mentioned things in mind while advertising on FaceBook and you are sure to sail through. It is all about targeting the right audience in the right manner, because users are far quicker than Google, when it comes to completely discarding the ads. Once that is done, your valuable investment goes down the drain.
