Why would you want to advertise on Facebook? For starters there are 900 million people on facebook with 526 million daily active users.  That is a lot of people.  But of course you are not trying to communicate with all 900 million people. You only want to communicate with those who would have an interest in your product.  Facebook makes this possible in a way that is unique to online marketing.

Facebook knows a lot about you. You volunteer this information to be social, to communicate with friends and to follow your interests. Some of you have told it your marital status, where you went to school, how old you are and where you work.  These can all be used to market your product. Lets work on an example, myself.  Facebook knows that I have an interest in beer.  I’ve posted about beer. I like home brew shops, breweries and sites that talk about beer.  Other people want to sell products to people who have an interest in beer. Facebook makes this profiling possible. Let’s look at how we build this type of ad.

First we go to our facebook page and build an ad. You are presented with the ad builder screen. We start with a destination. We want to sell a product so we are directing them to a website. We are using a landing page. (More about landing pages in a future post.) Next, we type in our ad title and text and an optional image.
Now we start our profiling. Facebook has started the profiling by limiting our ad to the United States. You are free to remove that restriction or to add Canada or another country to it. You could also target a state, zip code or multiples of these locations.   Next we go for interests. For our fictional ad, we are looking to target home brewers. We type that in and of course Facebook has that as an interest.  This now limits our target to the 11080 . people Facebook believes have an interest in home brewing. We could add other interests, age etc as well.

We then select our budget for clicks. This is a bidding process. Other people want to get ads in front of these same people for a range of interests.  If every time these people go to a page and there are ads out there that have bid higher than our ad, we will not make it onto the page.   Facebook is suggesting 87 cents will get our ads on pages of home brewing fans in the US.  We should stick with this bid and monitor it to see how much it gets used.  We are only bidding on the clicks. We will also be able to monitor how many times it is displayed. 

We now have an ad that will run for a month. It will get in front of a large precentage of the 11080 Facebook users who have shown an interest in home brewing.  For those that click on it we will have 87 cents. This is very effective and affordable advertising.