Advertising on Facebook

[janeth]

I’ve been looking into doing some advertising on Facebook and thought I would share my thoughts. When I am trying to think of ideas I like to write them down and here are my thoughts on advertising on Facebook.

As it currently stands Facebook has more members then there are men, women and children in all of the United States. They get over 39 billion page views per month and that is currently more than any other website online including Google.

While all of the above makes advertising on Facebook extremely interesting, the fact that they have more information for me to target my audience than any other advertising medium in the world makes it more interesting.

Let’s say that I am selling birthday balloons targeted at 3 year old girls. I am able to target all mothers who have a 3 year old daughter whose having a birthday this week. I guess you are wondering how many members of facebook are having a birthday today, how about just over 1 million each and every day.

That’s right, every day there are over 1 million members of facebook having a birthday.

I can target married men in Atlanta Georgia who are religious, in their 30’s and 40’s, have kids, and enjoy grilling out and with this information I can sell them my new barbeque sauce.

Or how about women who have graduated in the last ten years and are about to have a ten year reunion coming up, I can sell them my new workout video to. I know they want to look good for the next class reunion.

And not only will my ads show up on the members profile pages but since facebook changed the rules and will now allow Google to crawl and index those pages, I’ll be showing up in Google as well. This means people will be stumbling across facebook pages when doing searches on Google. And my ads could very well be on those pages.

The problem with advertising on Facebook is that 90% of the people on Facebook are there to meet up with friends or find out what their old friends have been up to. But then people watching TV are there to watch a movie and not to watch commercials, the one thing for sure is that it’s going to be a lot different than advertising on one of the major search engines.

Here are my thoughts.

Since I am trying to sell to people that are not there to buy it’s going to be a lot harder, but the ability to laser target the people I am trying to sell to allows me to write an adjust my ads for them, which makes selling a lot easier.

I also have the ability to start a group and then run ads for the members of those groups. Or for that fact even contact owners of other groups and get them to run my ads to their members.

First up is the creation of my ad, the neat thing about Facebook is that I can add an image into my ad, but the image has to be relevant to my product. I want a picture that has the ability to grab your attention and has something to do with my product. And lets no forget that I can add a little text into my image.

Example of an ad I found on FaceBook



The image is important because it is the only tool I’ve got to get their attention. Once I figure out the image I’ll make a title that ask a question, because questions also draw the eye and gets our attention. And last but not least is the body that will make a promise.

Of course I could add a phone number and encourage people to call, making less people click on my ad and causing me to pay less for my ad. Or I could just put my logo and use facebook to help build brand awareness and hope that no one ever clicks on it.

If I was getting a good click through rate I could change it from a CPC to CPM.

But where would I send someone that doesn’t want to be advertised to?

I’d have to have a landing page that didn’t look spammy and answered the promise that I promised an answer to in the ad.

So…I’d answer a problem that everyone is having in a couple sentences, a kickass answer that no one else would have thought about when thinking about my product or service. The page needs to be clean and only have this answer on it.

At the bottom I could have something like now that you know this checkout blah, blah, blah.

Anyone got any ideas on a better way to do this?

I’ve not run the ads yet so at this moment all the above is nothing more than guessing?

Has anyone done any advertising with FaceBook and if so what type of results did you get?

[astro]

Janeth, you have listed all my reasons not to have a page on Facebook.

After 6 months I managed earlier today to get my partner and better half to delete her page. Nothing to do with all this recent publicity and the not so "mass" walk out. More to do with stupid people linking her page as their contact details in an attempt to annoy.

What is more I still believe in experienced surfers suffer banner blindness, inexperienced ones just like wasting your time and lack the courage to buy on line until they gain some experience then of course..........experienced surfers suffer banner blindness! The world's a circle Janeth.

[janeth]

Janeth, you have listed all my reasons not to have a page on Facebook.

After 6 months I managed earlier today to get my partner and better half to delete her page. Nothing to do with all this recent publicity and the not so "mass" walk out. More to do with stupid people linking her page as their contact details in an attempt to annoy.

What is more I still believe in experienced surfers suffer banner blindness, inexperienced ones just like wasting your time and lack the courage to buy on line until they gain some experience then of course..........experienced surfers suffer banner blindness! The world's a circle Janeth.

Yes it is and as Facebook gets more into selling ad space lots more may leave as well.

[astro]

Yes it is and as Facebook gets more into selling ad space lots more may leave as well.

No "getting into" about it Janeth, it was all planned from day one.....well day two or three anyway.

All Facebook is is a flock of 395 million sheep (or in your case wildebeest!) the other 5 million are the wolves, jackals, Crocs and lions circling the flock waiting their moment to dive in and grab a few!

/astro

[janeth]

No "getting into" about it Janeth, it was all planned from day one.....well day two or three anyway.

All Facebook is is a flock of 395 million sheep (or in your case wildebeest!) the other 5 million are the wolves, jackals, Crocs and lions circling the flock waiting their moment to dive in and grab a few!

/astro

Maybe we should try and market to the wolves.

[Tubby]

I have never done any paid advertising. I decided that facebook looked tempting.

"Hi Pat Davis,

Welcome to Facebook Ads and congratulations on creating your first ad!"

I have selected Australian users aged 45 to 60 years old with an expressed interest in classic cars. I did bid a bit cheap. . But as it is my first my adventure into advertising and I have very few Australian visitors (mostly USA) . What the Heck.

Thanks Janeth. . Your post and a request for friendship from a distant relative Jogged me into action..

[Tubby]

If I put my thinking cap on and take a good hard look at google and adsense I think Face book has the potential to target Googles one great vulnerability.

Many many sites display adsense for no other reason than to get paid clicks. Knocking a hole in adsense revenue ( I have noticed a down turn) could leave many pointless sites without revenue. . No point in them existing any more. Nobody gets paid to create a Face book page - there is no google incentivised reward for traffic.

Sites that are not capable of standing alone without adsense will suffer. (If the trend changes to the new format)

My sites display adsense and at the height of the google reign I hit figures around $2800 per month. This is continuosly decreasing and I find myself gradually altering my web pages to enable paid membership. Put simply I am phasing out adsense in favour of offering benefits in return for paid membership.

If google and adsense are deprived of websites seeking high traffic merely for clicks on ads. many sites will find themselves with no reason to actively seek those high google rankings.
As a by product less google adverts will be displayed.

I think the changing of the balance - or the return swing of the pendulum is just about beginning to become predictable.

Now I believe it is time for me to offer my users a little bit more..... I think I have seen the writing on the wall.

[janeth]

I have never done any paid advertising. I decided that facebook looked tempting.

"Hi Pat Davis,

Welcome to Facebook Ads and congratulations on creating your first ad!"

I have selected Australian users aged 45 to 60 years old with an expressed interest in classic cars. I did bid a bit cheap. . But as it is my first my adventure into advertising and I have very few Australian visitors (mostly USA) . What the Heck.

Thanks Janeth. . Your post and a request for friendship from a distant relative Jogged me into action..

Let us know the results....please

[janeth]

If I put my thinking cap on and take a good hard look at google and adsense I think Face book has the potential to target Googles one great vulnerability.

Many many sites display adsense for no other reason than to get paid clicks. Knocking a hole in adsense revenue ( I have noticed a down turn) could leave many pointless sites without revenue. . No point in them existing any more. Nobody gets paid to create a Face book page - there is no google incentivised reward for traffic.

Sites that are not capable of standing alone without adsense will suffer. (If the trend changes to the new format)

My sites display adsense and at the height of the google reign I hit figures around $2800 per month. This is continuosly decreasing and I find myself gradually altering my web pages to enable paid membership. Put simply I am phasing out adsense in favour of offering benefits in return for paid membership.

If google and adsense are deprived of websites seeking high traffic merely for clicks on ads. many sites will find themselves with no reason to actively seek those high google rankings.
As a by product less google adverts will be displayed.

I think the changing of the balance - or the return swing of the pendulum is just about beginning to become predictable.

Now I believe it is time for me to offer my users a little bit more..... I think I have seen the writing on the wall.

I had a guy come from Holland many years ago with a Yahoo account. He paid us a percent of what Yahoo paid him and we were making about $15,000.00 per month off our part.

We did it for about a year but eventually walked away from the whole thing. When we stopped we had about 2,000 junk websites.

Now I have about 200 good websites.

Google AdSense causes people to create MFA sites and it dirties up the internet.

[jettlee1]

how can face book target Google.