Facebook Advertising

I wouldn't say I'm the leading authority on Facebook advertising - I'm not sure that anyone is yet. It's still pretty new and although there are a lot of people doing it, I'm not sure if anyone has really tapped the full potential of what Facebook can offer.

A while back, Facebook turned down a billion dollars from Google to sell their company... at the time, many people (including myself) thought they were nuts. After all, there's not much I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars, except for something that was gonna be worth more than a billion dollars in just a few years...

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN generate revenue through advertising and do a very good job of helping advertisers reach their target audience by bringing relevant content up on searches and tagging it with relevant ads. This is very effective, the way the yellow pages was about 10 years ago - if you were looking for a landscaper, you went to the landscaping section and you would find a landscaper... now, you type in landscaping into a search engine and you find your landscaper. The search results are tagged with relevant ads based on keywords purchased by advertisers. This reaches the intended target very effectively, you wouldn't type in landscapers into the search engine unless you needed one, right?

So, why is Facebook a better option for advertisers? On Facebook, you can target geographically, demographically, psychographically and by their interests. So, as a landscaper that specializes in J.R.R. Tolkein inspired designs for backyards, you can target this in your ads so that only people that have Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, LOTR, JRR Tolkein or Bilbo Baggins in their profile see your ad. That's pretty direct by any standard. You'd be hard pressed to find any other medium that could target this specifically... OK, there's probably a LOTR magazine, but you'd have to wait months to get your ad in and see results - on Facebook you see your results on the same day.

Another thing I should mention is that online advertising is the only true pay for performance advertising available to advertisers... you only pay for the ad when it get's used (clicked on). If you can't convert the leads or get the business after the click, that's another problem - the ad worked though. And, that's what it's all about folks, finding ways to get your advertising to work.

We are helping a few companies advertise on Facebook and put our own ads up there too - afterall, how can we recommend it if we don't even do it ourselves.