How to use social ads

 

How to use social ads

“Social Ads” are what Facebook calls 

 those ads you see on the right-hand side of

your screen. I have my doubts about how effective they are, compared with

engaging people with valuable content on your Facebook Page (have you clicked

on one of those ads lately?) and they cost money. However, social ads are

worth considering for a short period when you first launch something whether

it’s your website, your Facebook Page or a new product or service to help raise

awareness within your target audience.

“social ads are worth considering for a short period when you

first launch something”

They are also worth considering because they are highly targeted to not only by

demographics such as gender, location, and age, but by the keywords and job

titles people include in their profiles. You can reach a small number of highly

targeted individuals for very little cost.

You have the option of choosing pay per click, or pay per view. Because click-

through rates on Facebook are so low, you should always choose pay per click.

Like other PPC services, such as Google AdWords, you can set a budget limit

and spend as much or as little as you choose.

The other reason to look at social ads even if you have no intention of ever

advertising on Facebook is to research the size of your potential market on

Facebook. If you go through the ad set-up screens but without actually

completing your ad, you can still do the demographic and keyword targeting to

find out how many people you could reach with an ad. As you narrow your

keyword-based search criteria, Facebook will give you a number—the number

of people at whom the ad would be targeted. This will provide you with some

useful market intelligence about the people you are trying to reach. It is

especially useful if you are a local business and may even help you decide if

Facebook is a good place for you to do business.

Find out more at www.facebook.com/advertising.

Manage the workload

You can cut down on time maintaining groups and pages especially if you have

several by setting up multiple administrators to look after them. These might

be colleagues or employees or a task outsourced to a virtual assistant. Read carefully for more on hiring virtual assistants.

But the real trick to managing your Facebook workload is to aggregate. Social

networking really starts to get interesting once you use Facebook as an

aggregator for your social media presence elsewhere. Do this by installing some

of the apps on your page that pull in your blog, videos, Flickr photos, Delicious

links, and so on.

You can go a stage further by signing up to another social network called

FriendFeed (www.friendfeed.com). Don’t worry this isn’t going to be yet

another network that you have to maintain—you’re just going to tell it the other.

social sites you have a presence on and let it do the rest. Although you can use

FriendFeed to post status updates, send direct messages, create lists of friends

and join groups, the most effective way to use it is simply as a social media

aggregator: a place to create a single timeline made up of all your feeds from

various social sites.

With FriendFeed you can list around 60 different web services that you’re on,

including blogs and RSS feeds, social bookmarking sites, photo-sharing sites,

status updates from Facebook and Twitter, video-sharing sites such as YouTube,

and many others. This is a way of really cutting down the maintenance

workload. Whenever you add photos to Flickr, favorite a video on YouTube,

update your blog, update your Twitter status and so on, it all appears in a real-

time aggregated timeline on FriendFeed. And the best thing is that no one

actually has to go to your FriendFeed page to see this. By installing the

FriendFeed application on Facebook, all your updates from FriendFeed (and

therefore your entire social media presence), will appear in your Facebook

timeline. If you wish, you can also create a widget to put on your blog, or link

FriendFeed to Twitter. FriendFeed offers a range of advanced Twitter settings

that enable you to post everything to Twitter or just those specific services you

choose. You can also choose to make the links click through to the original

source instead of FriendFeed.

“this is a way of really cutting down the maintenance

workload”

You probably won’t want to rely exclusively on FriendFeed to aggregate your

social media within Facebook, particularly if you have a blog or podcast that you

want to make more prominent on your profile or page. You could include your

FriendFeed feed on a discrete tab within your page and rely on the range of

Facebook applications that will pull in your most important media, such as your

blog, onto your wall.

Measure your results

This is really where Facebook pages come into their own. You have free access

to a vast amount of data and metrics about your fans. This can be useful for

market research, developing new products or services, or just gaining a better

understanding of who your customers are.

Simply go to www.facebook.com/pages/manage and click View Insights next to

the page that you want to see the data for.

Facebook insights

You can also go directly to www.facebook.com/insights to view data for all your

pages. Data available include

• Demographic breakdown by age and gender.

• Fourteen different graphs over time, including total fans, new fans, top

countries, interactions, and mentions.

• Breakdown of fans by geographic location—both by country and city. This

is useful if, say, you’re considering a local marketing campaign in cities

where you’re popular, or simply to target your social ads better.

• Most popular languages used by fans. This might be useful for deciding

whether you should make parts of your website available in other languages.

With groups, you have little more than the number of members to go on.

For social ads, you get the sort of statistics you would expect: impressions, click-

through rates, traffic and costs. You should record these for each campaign you

run to get an idea of which are the most effective.

Take action

• Sign up for an account at www.facebook.com.

• Set up a personal profile.

• Create a page or group for your business.

• Promote your page.

• Install applications and consider creating your own app.

• Aggregate your other social media.