10 Quick Steps to Start Advertising on Facebook

If you have a Facebook business page, the next step for many businesses is to try a Facebook ad or an advertising campaign. Your goal may be to increase your number of likes or to promote a specific post or event. Luckily, if you can use Facebook, you can fairly easily place a Facebook ad to test the waters, so to speak.

Assuming you have a Facebook page (and you should! It’s free!), below are some quick steps to get started advertising:

1. 1. 1. Determine your goal. If you are just getting started with Facebook advertising or testing the waters, perhaps you want to see if you can get more likes for your page.
      
      
   2. 2. Determine what specifically you want to advertise. You may want to start with advertising your Facebook page, website URL, or a Facebook event that you want to promote. Are you having an event like a grand opening? Are you having a major special that you would like to advertise to your current Facebook audience? Are you just trying to increase your Facebook audience because you’re starting to leverage your Facebook site? You can also advertise a Facebook application, a place, a domain, or Facebook URL. Or you can promote a particular post.
      
      
   3. 3. Determine your budget. You can spend from $1 to $5000/day. When you create the ad, you will be able to set a budget – either daily for a certain period of time or an overall “bid” budget not to be exceeded.
      
      
   4. 4. Decide whether you will pay per impression (which is the default) or pay per click (for which you need to choose Advanced Options). If you choose Pay Per Click, the ad will be seen to the left or the right of the page to grab the attention of users, and you pay when a user clicks on the ad. If you choose Pay Per Impression, you pay per thousand "impressions," or in other words per thousand times your ad is displayed.
      
      
   5. 5. Decide your audience. You can target by gender, age, location, and specific interests. When you create your ad and set up your targets, you will see the estimated number of Facebook users in your target audience.
      
      
   6. 6. Unless you are promoting a post, you will need to write your ad copy in 90 characters or less , and be sure to include a call to action. This is important but sometimes forgotten. You have already decided what you want users to do. Make sure you ask them to do it.
      
      
   7. 7. Include a graphic . Close ups of faces work well, or bright colors. You can just use your logo or an image associated with your business, or a more targeted image that would appeal to the audience you are targeting.
      
      
   8. 8. Put it out there! If you’re going to be promoting a post or event, make sure that the post or event is created in Facebook, and then create and post your ad on Facebook. You should be able to create your ad quickly if you have your image, your ad copy, and your payment information.
      
      
   9. 9. Check your metrics in the Ads Manager. This is the fun part, where you see the number of likes, joins, etc. that were generated from your ad, and you can see how well your Facebook advertising is working.
      
      
   10. 10. See if small changes in your ad make a difference in your metrics. You may want to create a couple of different ads to test out how well each ad works. You can do that in a couple of different ways. You can create separate campaigns and run them at the same time, or you can tweak your ad and compare your metrics from one day to the next.

Facebook advertising can be very effective for getting customers engaged with your business and increasing your sales. At World Source Tech, we specialize in maximizing your social media presence with targeted, effective marketing. When you need expertise about the ever-changing social media landscape, contact us at 616-419-5515 or http://worldsourcetech.com/contact.

Photo: Owen W Brown