Once you have gotten your business going with business services and funding, you will continue on to the next step of business development: advertisement. Social media is a great outlet for cheap n’ easy (not to mention effective) marketing that will put your business on the map. And we all know what the most prominent form of social media is. Facebook.
Facebook dominates social media advertising for a couple of reasons: 1) it’s cheap, 2) it has the capacity to access over 500 million users, 3) it has the most developed advertising platform among social networking sites.
Types of Facebook Advertising:
There are two different types of advertising when using Facebook: internal and external. External advertising is the advertising that we all see, a link on Facebook that sends the user to a business’ website. This form of advertising allows you to quickly and easily bring people to your domain by putting up an ad. Internal advertising refers to the creation of a Facebook page, which allows users to “like” your product or company. If you want to build a community and interact with customers, internal advertising could be beneficial to you. If you feel that you will be unable to keep up with user-feedback, you should probably stick with external advertising.
Placing a Facebook Ad:
So how do you place an ad? Well, first you have to design and price your ad. Facebook offers two types of pricing schemes, Cost Per Mille (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC). In Latin, “mille” means one thousand, so in CPM the company pays for the number of ad views by the thousands. CPC stands for “cost per click” — the company pays for each click made on the marginal ad. CPC advertising could benefit you if you aren’t sure how the public will react to your ad. In this model, you are guaranteed clicks. However, if you can target your ad really well (e.g. by geography, age-group, or “liked” pages on Facebook) then you can logically predict that you will get decent click-through rates with CPM. Here, the “bidder” doesn’t have to limit their clicks to their budget, like in CPC advertising. If you have a large budget and are trying to target a massive audience, CPC could be for you. If you are targeting a much more specific group and are confident that this group will click-through, CPM may be best. Keep in mind that Facebook advertising is relatively flexible, so if you pick one pricing scheme that isn’t working out, you can easily change to the other pricing scheme.
So there you have it: the 411 on placing a Facebook ad. Over time you will doubtlessly tweak your advertisements, dictating what works and what doesn’t through trial and error. After time and trial, you will surely see the results of Facebook advertising. If you want to improve your Facebook advertising even further, why not try Facebook lead generation?
James Kim is a writer for Choosewhat.com. ChooseWhat is a company that provides product reviews and test data for business services and products. Their goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.
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