Does Facebook Advertising Really Work? (Part 1 of 2)

Happy New Year! What better way to start striking things off your resolution checklist then by primping up your Facebook Business Page Ads! No doubt if you’re a small business owner you’ve resolved 2012 to be the year of more strategic business advertising, more cost-conscious with marketing expenses, and more actively deepening your relationships with family, friends, and clientele (losing a few pounds couldn’t hurt, either). Well, like always, Little Jack is here for the rescue! Check out our Getting Started article. We’ve got all the details typed out on how to start an effective Facebook Advertisment; from designing to targeting your market to launching your ad and keeping in mind all aesthetics and executive details.
For those of you unfamiliar with Facebook Ads, we’ll fill you in. Facebook Ads are advertisements that are inserted into the right-hand margin of the facebook-user’s webpage. The ads are strategically generated to enhance your social networking experience, based on the web pages you frequent and the content you search (so be careful what you browse through, ‘cuz the internet is watching you). Essentially, this integrated approach allows advertisers to reach potential customers before they even begin searching their products with side-advertising consistent with customers’ interests.
This feature of search advertising allows entrepreneurs to target network users based on what they predict users will be searching for. The way Facebook Ads are designed, advertisers will be able to target specific groups of people based on the information and content users post and share in their profiles. Advertising can be targeted broadly by area or social demographic and can later be narrowed down to cater to peoples’ specific interests.
Here is an example of how a metric can be used to measure input, output, and overall efficiency of your advertising:

• Targeted – Indicates the approximate number of people your Sponsored Stories or ads can reach based on the targeting group you’ve selected
• Reach / Campaign Reach – The number of individual people who saw your Sponsored Stories or ads. This is different than impressions, which includes people seeing them multiple times.
• Social Reach – People who saw your Sponsored Stories or ads with the names of their friends who liked your Page, RSVPed to your event, or used your app. If you’re not using Sponsored Stories or advertising a Page, event or app, you won’t have social reach.
• Frequency – The average number of times each person saw your campaign’s Sponsored Stories or ads.
• Connections – The number of people who liked your Facebook Page, RSVPed to your event, or installed your app within 24 hours of seeing a Sponsored Story or ad in this campaign.
• Clicks – The number of clicks this campaign’s Sponsored Stories or ads have received.
• CTR – Click-through rate, or the number of clicks this campaign’s Sponsored Stories or ads received divided by the number of times they were shown on the site during the dates selected.
• Response (table) – Track trends in how many people have clicked or connected with your campaign in the last 28 days. For ads, if your response is decreasing, try using new ad text or images to reengage your audience.

We hear the wheels cranking in your head. Slowly cranking. There are other simple ways to get people to quickly interact with your business, without ever having to leave the photo album of their ex’s bachelorette party. By liking your business’s Facebook page or by even RSVPing to your own event, another user will see your name or a friend’s name in your ad and be more inclined to check it out. We all know that personal recommendations work the best. In fact, if a user sees a friend’s name in an ad on Facebook, they are 68% more likely to remember the ad and twice as likely to remember the brand.
Another helpful feature in the same vein on Facebook is the new Sponsored Stories page.
Sponsored stories are regular News Feed stories that have been promoted to the right-hand column of Facebook, where you may be more likely to discover the new interests of your friends. These stories only show up between friends, so you can learn about places to go, apps to use, games to play and organizations that your friends like.
Go ahead and browse through these links. Let us know what you think and hopefully we can help get some of those business resolutions underway!
 
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