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The following is a guest post by James Kim
Once you've got your business off the ground through the use of some business services and proper funding, you have to make sure your business can be successful moving forward. This, of course, means advertising. The upside to advertising in our modern world is that you can use social media to get cheap ads that reach tons of potential customers. Once you're past the first part of deciding which network to use, you have to figure out how to dive into your choice of platform, which leads us to our current topic: Facebook.
Facebook is the king of social media advertising because it has the most developed advertising platform among the social networks. It's still relatively new compared to other forms of Internet marketing like Google AdWords, and it's fairly cheap.
With Facebook, you can do two main types of advertising: internal and external.
External advertising is the traditional style we're all used to, with a link on Facebook leading to your website. Internal, on the other hand, will advertise a page you make for your business on Facebook and will allow people to “like” your page, building up a following.
Obviously, you have to know what your goals are when you choose between these options. Not looking to invest much time and just looking to get an ad on a big website? Choose external. Want to build up a community based around your business where you can interact with customers (a significantly more involved option, especially since you have to create and monitor a Facebook page)? Choose internal.
If you carefully cultivate your efforts, the internal option is clearly superior, but it's not for everyone, so you shouldn't feel pressured into doing it just because it's “the thing to do.” Choosing the external option is far better than choosing the internal one and losing out because you're not putting in enough time or executing it correctly.
Now to the good part: actually placing the ads. Going step-by-step, you have to design, target and price your ad. Designing the ad just consists of a giving a title, a short text snippet and an image if you want one. The end result is a small box on the side of someone's Facebook page with your title in big, blue text as a link with the picture underneath and then the text at the very bottom (which will have the “Like” button below it if you opt to go that route).
Targeting your ad is where you see the real value in Facebook marketing, since there are a lot of targeting options to choose from. Your options are: location, age, sex, education, workplace, relationship status, relationship interests, languages and the classic keywords.
To give you a further idea of the surprising options Facebook gives you, you can even choose to specifically target people on their birthdays, an option that definitely holds appeal for some businesses. Once you've set your options, you'll be shown an estimate of how many people the ad will reach, which will allow you to tweak everything so that you can hit a sweet spot of general versus specific.
Finally, you have to set the pricing for your ad. First, familiarize yourself with the two pricing schemes that Facebook offers: CPM and CPC, which is paying for impressions and paying for clicks, respectively.
CPM stands for “cost per million,” as you pay for how many ad views there are in total (calculated in multiples of 1,000). CPC, on the other hand, stands for “cost per click,” meaning you pay for each click on your ad, regardless of how few or many there are. If you just want to promote your brand and aren't advertising for a specific, commercial reason, you should choose the CPM model. CPC is the better model if each click counts (and Facebook gives you estimates of how many you'll get per day based on your bid). Think of it as either going for quantity or quality.
And there you go! You've placed an ad on Facebook! Over time, you can tweak your settings (e.g., how much you're willing to pay per click) to try to get the best return possible. It's certainly not hard to place ads on Facebook, but getting it perfect is where the effort lies. Every minute spent is worth it, though.
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James Kim is a writer for Choosewhat.com, which provides product reviews and test data for business services and products. Choosewhat.com's goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.
