Is Facebook for Your Market?

As Facebook’s active users continue to rise, the number of social ad participants is also increasing. This is such a wonderful time for utilizing the new tools Facebook has given, especially with a network of an estimated 400 million users. But as many have found out, Facebook advertising is not for every business.

A comScore survey looked exclusively at the impact of ad impressions on visitation to the advertiser’s site and found that though there was a 65.0% lift after one week of ad circulation, lifts in site visitation varies between categories. Results show that the more narrowly tailored an advertisement is, the better the lift in site visitation.

This was specifically seen in automotive advertising that referred users to highly specific automotive Web sites. On the other hand, apparel and retail advertisers’ site visitation dropped the least over the four week period while CPG & restaurants continued to drop sharply after the first week.

The best thing to remember when approaching Facebook for advertising is that it is somewhat different than utilizing other advertising tools. In an interview with Tim Kendall, Facebook’s Director of Monetization and performance advertising head, on insidefacebook .com, he reminded advertisers that Facebook is a people targeting system and not a keyword targeting system. This makes it even more important for a company to really know their audience and how to target them.

Luckily, using Facebook for advertising to target audiences has become easier with the ability to filter ad placement based on specific qualifications like location, age, sex, marital status, connections, friends of connections and more. There is even a keyword section to allow ad placers the opportunity to target based on keywords in a user’s profile. It is because of a user’s willingness to share niche interests on their profile that allow categories like entertainment to work well with Facebook advertising. The ability to set-up a page and have fans enables an advertiser the opportunity to branch to friends of friends and beyond. This works well for Facebook’s ability to  targeting users based on what pages they are already affiliated with.

As far as whether or not Facebook advertising is effective, the answer to that lies in how well an ad is tailored to fit an audience. Another study by comScore (found on InspireMedia.com) showed that 28% of respondents were likely to notice advertising on social media sites, this placed user-generated content sites fifth behind television, print, news and corporate Web sites. However, Kendall believes that there is a 100% improvement on a click through rate basis when an impression is a Social ad (or event ads). “People come to Facebook to learn about their friends, so if you can make the advertising about their friends, it’s more effective.”

A great place to go for more information on what rules to follow when setting up a Facebook ad is the 10 rules for advertising on Facebook article by Nick O’Neill. This article gives great advice for how to keep the target audience in mind as well as establishing and keeping advertising goals.