Thinking Of Paying Facebook For Ads? Use These Tips To Do It Right

Does your business really make use of Facebook? Or do you merely update your page occasionally with some hope of keeping your fans updated? There’s a difference. A big difference.

This post appeared on MakeUseOf.

When Facebook stopped being a completely free business tool, some people took offense. Now it seems some businesses are simply moving away from Facebook, focusing more on their own sites. But while this approach is sensible from an overall perspective, it completely fails to utilise what Facebook can still offer all businesses — knowledge and reach. Make sure you take full advantage of it.

Create A Compelling Giveaway

Come up with something irresistible that you can offer your fans, like a chapter from your next book, or a Webinar or something like our hardware giveaways. Get the nuts and bolts of your offer on a website landing page or on a new dedicated tab on your Facebook page. Make sure you’re collecting email addresses and getting all the analysis you can out of your landing page, so that you can contact them later and track who is signing up for your giveaway and why.

Researching Your Market

Most businesses running Facebook pages have looked into their insights and taken stock of the information they can get from it. If you haven’t, you should read up on how to fully understand your Facebook Insights information.

But that’s just the start. Consider the numerous interesting Facebook Graph Searchesyou can make and you will realise that it’s possible to learn a lot about your fans using this tool, too. For instance, try a search for “Pages liked by people who like [My Page]” and you’ll get a feel for your competition, plus the other sorts of things your fans may have in common.

The more insightful searches could include:

• Pages liked by people who like [Your Page]
• TV Shows liked by people who like [Your Page]
• Apps used by people who like [Your Page]

You can also do this for other pages, either by typing in the name of the page and hoping it comes up or by getting the page number. You’ll notice that the URL of each search has your Page ID in it. This means you could also find the Facebook ID of your competitors and other pages and check out what else the people who like these like. To get this Facebook ID, you could use a tool like http://findmyfacebookid.com/. Then insert the numbers into the URL in place of your own page’s ID number.

Why do this? Well, it could improve the interest list you use when you get around to making your adverts later. For instance, if we were marketing a giveaway for a new Android Tablet I could check things liked by people who like the generic Android page. Then, when creating an advert, I would know to list these pages and apps as interests for my prospective audience.

• Pages liked by people who like Android
• Apps used by people who like Android

Understanding Your Current Reach & Edgerank

Currently, if you were to create a regular update to advertise a giveaway, do you know what sort of reach you’d get? If not, check out how to view and improve your page reach before you start.

When promoting something big, it’s usually a good idea to use some of the best tips for increasing your Edgerank. This will improve your reach naturally, and people are generally drawn to things like pictures anyway. Or, if you prefer not to upload images, you could just optimise the landing page to have a 1200×630 pixel feature image, then link to this page. It’s important to do a good job of this step.

Using Facebook Adverts & Boosts

It’s one thing to place an advert on Facebook. It’s a slightly different thing to take a post that is already doing quite well virally and give it an extra boost. The difference being that if you’ve already proven that your strategy, text, image choice and Edgerank are doing well, it’s actually worth putting a few dollars on this post to get it seen by some more eyeballs. It might take off with a bit more of a viral spread. This to me is a lesser gamble than creating the advert from scratch, even though the method of paid promotion is much the same once you decide to pay for it.

Consider taking the link or image you’ve just created further with a paid boost. Hover over the bottom-right of the post and Facebook will prompt you to try it. Click on it and choose “Use Advanced Options” to get the full advertising selection. When it comes to choosing your audience, read up on how to tweak your Facebook advert audience perfectly before you get started. But now that you’ve researched your market a little more (using Insights and Graph Search), have a go using some of the most useful interests you just found.

The trick, of course, is to narrow down your audience until it’s just the right people. Then you can make the most of every cent you spend on advertising.

When you consider the costs of running a targeted campaign like this against something a little more hit-and-miss like printing flyers and leaving them in pizza shops, you might realise there is real power behind making use of Facebook, not just for the adverts, but for the market research capabilities.

How do you make use of Facebook to promote yourself? Did you ever consider paying to promote your posts?