5 Reasons You Need to Be Advertising on Facebook

In the past 10 years, Facebook has made a monumental impact on our world.

This may sound like a bold overstatement, but just consider how many people you know who use it. For the average American, checking our profiles is an act we perform multiple times a day. As of March 2016, Facebook has 1.09 billion dail active users, 989 million of which access the network on their mobile devices.

Facebook serves various purposes. We may keep in contact with friends from around the world, occasionally updating our status to reflect our mood or share important news. We may use it to follow celebrities we admire or to stay updated with movies and TV series we enjoy. Last but not least, we may use it to advertise our business, using paid posts to capture the attention of new prospects.

Advertising accounts for the majority of Facebook’s revenue. In 2015, the network’s ad-generated revenue reached $17,079 billion. Almost every major brand you can think of is using Facebook to advertise their products and services, employing various media to grab potential new customers. However, while a higher budget enables businesses to invest in more advertising than those with lower budgets, companies of all sizes should be placing ads on Facebook.

Why?

1. You Can Find Fresh Leads Easily With A Minimum of Effort

Using Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences service, businesses have the power to find new prospects who are likely to have an interest in them due to their similarity to customers you usually target.

To start with, you can add a list of subscribers to your Facebook account, which is then cross-referenced with its own database. Any Facebook users who created a profile using the same email address you uploaded will be added to your Custom Audience.

From this, Facebook can build a Lookalike Audience by assessing data from those in your Custom Audience. They will compare users displaying the same interests and activities, and then provide the option to advertise in various ways (via news feeds, for example) and on desktops, on mobile devices, or both.

This ensures the audience you are targeting with your Facebook ads is a close reflection of your desired customers, and removes the randomization of simply placing advertisements in front of people unlikely to show any interest.

2.  You Can Enjoy Low Advertising Costs and Spend More on Your Website

Businesses of all sizes can advertise on Facebook, regardless of their budget. Investing in marketing might seem like a complicated and daunting prospect for start-ups with no experience, but using the world’s biggest social network is a great place to begin.

Facebook’s advertising system offers companies the cheapest rates per 1,000 impressions available, and paying just $1 each day puts our advertisements on the screens of 4,000 users. As your enterprise may well be able to attract thousands of new followers every day, having a website good enough to convert visitors is essential.

With such cheap advertising, Facebook marketing leaves businesses with funds to invest on building a quality website and creating powerful content.

[Read also: How to Promote Your Business on Facebook]

3. You Can Analyze The Success of Specific Ads

With Facebook Insights, businesses are offered a wealth of analytics data ideal for tweaking ads to perform better. The platform’s measurement tools provide information on: the number of engagements each ad makes; the cost per result; conversion rates; and people reached. This is provided in clear, easy-to-understand charts for quick assessment.

Facebook’s measurement tools also allow businesses to specifically target users by various criteria: exact locations (cities, states, country); behaviors (recent home-buyers, for example); home ownership; age; and more. As mentioned in our first point, this specific targeting helps businesses to ensure their investments are not going to waste, and maximize the chances of the ads’ success.

Based on a particular ad’s performance, businesses can tweak their settings to improve their reach. This may be a change to the location, imaging, or the age, which can be made quickly and easily. The Adverts Manager App allows businesses to assess their ads’ performance and experiment with changes at any time, any place.

4. You Can Tempt Facebook Users With Special Offers

In most sectors, competition is fierce. Advertising must be strong enough to distinguish brands from their rivals, and engage prospects, but knowing how to actually do this can be difficult.

Step forward Facebook Offer Claims. This marketing tool allows businesses to advertise special discounts and deals, with a wide range of options to guide who will see these ads.

Offer Claim ads can be tailored to suit your company’s exact profile. Write your own text, select your own eye-catching images, create an expiration date, and set a limit on the amount of users able to claim the offer. You can also set the type of audience you want to target.

Offer Claim ads are ideal for spreading the word of specific products or services, driving traffic to your website. It is then up to you to convert them into return customers.

5. You Can Use More Copy in Your Ads than Google Allows

When placing ads on Google, businesses are restricted to 25 characters in a title and 70 in the text, with 35 more in the URL to be displayed. While Facebook allows 25 in the title as well, it also provides space for 135 in the actual body text, with no URL displayed.

Businesses which have invested in Google PPC may find Facebook’s ads provide them more freedom to engage users with more detailed text. The quality of the copy itself is the most important aspect, but it is worth experimenting with the longer form if your budget allows for cross-platform advertising.

More words to play with will allow for greater explanations of specific products, events, services, and more.

Facebook advertising offers businesses of all sizes and sectors significant benefits, with low costs equating to low risks. Companies can attract new users on top of those captured through additional advertising methods, encouraging loyal followers to Like their pages. Any business still to join Facebook as a promotional platform should consider creating an account sooner rather than later.

Kyle McManus is a freelance writer based in the UK. This article was prepared on behalf of Nett Solutions.

[Image via Google Images]