Could you use Facebook advertising?

In February this year Facebook announced that there were more than two million advertisers using the platform.

The question is; could you be missing out?

Here are some thoughts following our research:

The Facebook advertising platform is changing all the time. And, today it offers some really interesting advertising opportunities because you can be highly targeted.

A key principle of Facebook is creating audiences. You can target by demographics, attribute, interests and behaviours.

You can have a broad audience such as living in the UK, be defined by adding in other criteria like age and gender or be very narrow by adding in relationship status and interests like “reading business books”.

Examples of other filters include:

• Education
• Employers
• Job titles
• Industries
• Financial (in the USA only)
• Children ages
• Online buyers

You can also target using connections. For example, people who “like” your page are called Facebook Fans and you can create an advert for these people only. You can also create an advert to target fans of other pages. This could be pages linked to what you do in some way or competitors.

You can also upload an email list and have your adverts appear to this list only and target people who visit your Website. This means you can start to combine Google advertising and Search Engine Optimisation with Facebook advertising.

Warning
Facebook adverting is an outbound tactic; people are not on Facebook looking for products and services, like they are with Google. So, it’s vital that your creative is good. This means making sure the image and copywriting is highly effective.