A recent collaborative effort by SEOmoz CEO Randfish and David Klein offers advice on how best to leverage advertising on Facebook and build investment confidence in the space.
The following is a summary of their findings, posted on SEOmoz.com.
Facebook, sporting hundreds of millions of users, makes a compelling case for investing (chart via Nielsen) in the trendy social media landscape:
Ad options on the site differ from traditional paid search advertising (i.e., Google, Yahoo, Live Search) in that bids are for user demographic rather than keyword. Although still not perfect, demographic filtering technology allows for targeting of ads to a specific age, sex, school or sexual orientation. And unlike paid search, the competition is at manageable levels.
When creating a Facebook ad campaign, the ad targeting platform makes the following clear:
- Demographics are far more accurate than most data (age, sex, gender preference, relationship, etc.)
- Deep data - being able to choose to market to employees of specific companies, for instance - would work very well, for the right advertiser.
- Keyword associations people have with their Facebook accounts correlate well with their true interests
- The "approximate reach" number gives insight into target market size (even if you never place an ad)
Their recommendations:
- Don't throw all of your efforts into Facebook; like any other effort, it might just not work.
- Give it a "short leash." Limit the daily spending budget until it is clear how many of your objectives it will meet, and at what cost. Keep a close eye on your campaigns, especially the first week. (Weekends can vary drastically from weekdays.)
- Since you won't be spending much on the ads, try new creative. There's almost nothing to lose if they don't work.
- Think like the user. Put yourself in the mindset of the people who would buy from you and ask yourself what their demographics would be.
- Use great images. Find images that you can purchase the rights to, and use them.
- If it doesn't work, come back in a month and try again. Both Facebook advertising and its tools are rapidly changing, so maybe your campaign will work the next time around.
Marketing firms have worked around the clock to make advertising on Facebook more palatable to big brands. Social media strategies firm Buddy Media, for example, recently launched an offering that enables brands to augment their existing advertising efforts on Facebook, making it possible to deploy multiple "App-vertisements" on existing Facebook Pages.
About the same time, SocialMedia released a new form of advertising called the "WOMI" (Word of Mouth Impression) that offers customized ads based on an interactive format, using conversations between friends as an endorsement.
