Using The Big F For Promotion- Facebook

You got a F. You should use it. I am not talking about the word fail or the f on a test paper. I am talking about Facebook.

Facebook has managed to become a standard for all other social networking sites. Offering a staggering amount of apps, games and extras, this Web site is currently the second most popular in the United States (Alexa, March 2010). That is one popular social networking site. When you consider the sheer amount of traffic this Web site reaches, you might start to get a few ideas. Learn how to use Facebook for promotion, and harness some of that popularity for yourself.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use social networking to drive more traffic to your pages and earn more income? Well, you can. Learn how to use Facebook in a way that will help you boost your Web site’s money-making abilities.

How to Use Facebook for Promotion
The easiest way to promote your site or blog on Facebook is by creating a fan page and put it under the category that you fall under. Facebook has millions of users online every hour of the day. You can have some of those millions coming to your site. Make Facebook page based on your site, insert your web link on your Facebook page, suggest this group to your friends, in turn they will suggest it to there friend and before you know it your Facebook page is filled with fans.

Facebook has a search for pages, this is also a great way for members of Facebook to find your group.

How to Use Facebook Advertising Platform
You can reach your exact audience and connect real customers to your business.

• Reach over 400,000,000 active Facebook users.
• Attach social actions to your ads to increase relevance.
• Create demand for your product with relevant ads.
• Track your progress with real-time reporting.
• Gain insight about who’s clicking on your ad.

Facebook Targeting With Ads
Facebook provides 11 targeting factors for advertisers. Below is an outline of each of those factors:

• 1. Location – Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/provice, city, and metropolitan areas. All advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location you’d like to select.
• 2. Age – Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to select their age.
• 3. Birthday – This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what types of ads should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishin the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for higher conversion rates.
• 4. Sex – Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.
• 5. Keywords – Keywords will are based on a user’s profile information including Activities, Favorite Books, TV Shows, Movies, and more. I believe job titles are included in this field and I typically spend the most time trying to brainstorm effective keywords. What types of products do your customers like? What’s their job position within an organization? Spend time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.
• 6. Education – While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great way to promote it.
• 7. Workplaces – This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter can be priceless.
• 8. Relationship – Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their profile.
• 9. Interested In – This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to skip this field for most of my ads.
• 10. Languages – If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to them.
• 11. Connections – The connections fields were launched yesterday by Facebook and they enable you to include and exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the administrator of. If you’ve created a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively.

Remember to check out the Facebook Promotions Guidelines

Have you tried this method of advertising as yet? If so, how is it?