Social

You are undoubtedly aware that the web offers practically unlimited opportunities to get exposure, and this includes using the massively popular social networks that are available. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and others are used by millions of people every single day—and often multiple times per day.

For most local businesses, Facebook offers the most opportunity for good exposure at a good price. Although it has become very multidimensional, Facebook’s primary feature is still the “News Feed,” which shows current posts created by friends or entities for which you are connected to your Facebook account. The key thing that makes Facebook advertising so exciting is that you can get exposure directly in the News Feed.  This means that it is highly likely that a person will actually SEE your ad. If you place an ad in a newspaper, some people can read the whole paper and not even notice your ad. But with a Facebook News Feed ad, your ad will most likely be noticed as the viewer scrolls vertically. Also, Facebook offers an incredible array of options for targeting your ads based on demographics, locations, interests, devices, and even recent purchase history. With Facebook, you can get the right ad in front of the right person–at the right time! And the cost is much more affordable than any type of newspaper or print advertising.

As I mentioned, Facebook is multidimensional. Businesses can simply choose to use their Facebook page to get exposure without having to pay anything to Facebook. They can make regular posts, and those posts will sometimes show in the News Feed of the people who “liked” their page. The visibility that can be attained in this fashion is called “organic” visibility, and is very limited. One effective tactic is to create a post, and then use Facebook advertising to “promote” the post. This means that (for a fee) Facebook will make sure that your post gets seen by a wider audience.

There are many different approaches to using Facebook advertising, but they all start by choosing a campaign objective. This, of course, should be chosen based on the strategy for what you are trying to accomplish. Here are some of the objectives that can be chosen for Facebook ad campaigns:

• Promote your page (this means try to get more page “likes”)
• Send people to your website
• Reach people who are near your business (ads show on mobile devices when they are within a certain proximity)
• Raise attendance at your event
• Get people to claim an offer
• Get video views
• Get installs of your mobile app

Like many of today’s large web platforms, Facebook changes often. It can get quite confusing at times, but you can be sure that there is immense opportunity for your business to gain exposure by taking a steady and disciplined approach to using Facebook.