What can Facebook do for me?
So you have a great brand, you have a great product or service and you just need to get the word out to start seeing a greater return on your efforts. Facebook and other social networking sites appear to have a ‘captive audience’ who, if you could simply access them, would allow you to increase brand awareness, website traffic and sales.
Well Facebook is behind you 100%—in theory at least. They want you to be able to access their audience and they want to become the leader in online advertising—with a database of over 60 million active users who are all more than willing to provide very personal demographic information on their profiles, how could they not? There are some difficult issues to get around though. There are also some great advantages. So to help you better understand what Facebook can do for you and your brand, let’s break down the good and the bad of Facebook advertising.
The Good:It’s free! (For the most part)
If you want to create a profile for your brand, association, institution or otherwise, it’s completely free! Now the real trick after you have created a profile is then driving traffic to it, which can present the exact same problems as driving traffic to any website. Your advantage on Facebook is that with 65 billion page views monthly, you have an audience of loyal users surfing the social network instead of the web. To ‘Facebook’ someone or some entity is quickly catching up to the idea of ‘Googling’ someone. Except that on Facebook, you won’t have to sift through someone’s 10th grade track meet standings and if you’re searching for a company, you won’t just get pages touting the company line—you will get groups of employees, former employees, users of a product or service—in other words, (what appears to be) the unadulterated truth; all the more reason to sign up for a profile and get the official brand message out there.
Facebook Ads.
So how do you drive traffic to your profile? There are a few ways; the most significant of which is Facebook ads. With the amazing amount of information people provide on their Facebook profiles, Facebook targeting is incredibly specific. You can choose age, gender, industry, political viewpoint, and even include specific keywords to search for in users’ lists of interests. Your ad will show up directly in your demographics’ ‘newsfeed’—the constantly updating feed of information from which users garner most of their information about friends. So, right between “Sally just posted a new photo album from her trip to Spain” and “Brad is now listed as single”, your ad can appear; and with a well strategized value proposition and call to action, you have a sea of perfectly qualified leads being driven to your profile.
Application Support.
There are over 14,000 ‘applications’ created for Facebook—most created by third parties. These applications do everything from allowing users to play scrabble with one another to allowing them to show support for a cause, a sports team or even what schools they are considering attending. Some companies have even created their own applications. For example, Linkedin.com, an online business networking site, has taken advantage of the Facebook networking phenomenon and created an application which links the two networks together. Many applications also have built in advertisements themselves. The possibilities for the use of applications are endless.
No one likes junk mail.
In a recent blog entry by Sean Carton of the ClickZ Network, he compares the recent increases in commercial profiles on social networking sites to so many unwanted guests at an intimate party. This sort of backlash was bound to start eventually because, as Carton points out, no one likes to be ‘marketed to’. That said, people still watch commercials, they still buy products because of brand image and they still click on online ads. Why? Because the advertisement has been strategically created and placed to answer for the targeted demographic that age-old consumer question: “What’s in it for me?” As with any good relationship, if both parties feel they’re getting the better end of the bargain, you have a success.
Banners.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the low click rate on Facebook banners. The bad press on Facebook click throughs is, however, somewhat exaggerated in my opinion. Click through or CTR (Click Through Rate) is calculated based on how many clicks you get on your ad based on 100 views (impressions). You may only get a CPR as low as 0.07 on Facebook and compared to many other online advertising mediums, this may seem low; however, where else are you able to guarantee 1) such specific demographics for your impressions and 2) such a large number of impressions? For instance, with a CPR of 0.07, if your impressions are 2.7 million, you not only have around 1819 click throughs to your page, but 1819 *qualified* leads. But enough with the math.
No matter what advertising medium you choose to use; whether it be Facebook, banner advertising, print or otherwise, the following holds true:
- Being seen is important. Being seen by the right people is more important. Having something to say that the right people want to hear is most important.