Want to Build a Community around Your Brand – Facebook Advertising

Thought I'd kick off with a post of success. I am running a successful Facebook advertising campaign and am now convinced it's a valuable channel if your customers are using Facebook socially – and A LOT of customers use it socially. There are 3 primary reasons:

1. Flexibility of Ad Space: I say this with AdWords in mind. Use an image and up to 135 characters - plenty of room for play; and an easy pause and play feature helps as you test various ad copies.
2. Breadth of Targeting Options: The power one can derive from the various dimensions is astronomical – one story, someone sent a birthday message to his girlfriend by refining the target market down to her alone – and I believe the story; the demographics reports help with post analysis and testing.
3. and the Primary Reason – Price: If you are aggressive with your bids, actively manage your campaign, and experiment with your approach, you'll be able to derive a very cheap 'action' rate. Now the action and the cost will vary based on your objectives, but for my successful campaign, we're building a community around a future product at less than $2.14 a person

Another thing about the price - some aspects still require trial and error – thankfully at minimal cost. For example, here are two aspects of Facebook ad pricing you'll need to work through (these are directly from Facebook via email correspondence – and up for interpretation):

• The necessary bid for an active ad will be affected by the ad's past performance
• For ads that are reaching their daily budgets, our system will optimize your ad's bid to the minimum amount necessary for delivery that will also continue to use up the daily budget. This ensures that you get as many clicks (or impressions for CPM ads) as possible given your level of spend without needing to continually adjust the bid amount yourself

Couple things to note: A company will have to determine the value - direct, long term, or perceived – in developing a community around a brand, product or service. That should not be assumed. The second thing to consider is general resource allocation. While I've highlighted a low cost to Facebook advertising, there is a require FTE cost to consider. Total resource allocation across marketing should take into account all channels and campaign types.

It's my firm belief that folks will miss out if they don't recognize and utilize Facebook advertising as an inexpensive platform to build community around a brand, product or service. To be able to do this in a space where the customer is already interacting with friends, networks, and family makes it an ideal compliment to a complete marketing channel approach.

Have you tried Facebook advertising for your own company or as an agent? How would you rate your results?

Comments

[Greenspan company profile]

Nice post! Online marketing is a new avenue for marketers to promote businesses. Social media marketing is also a highly used form of marketing in which popular social media platforms are used to interact with and engage customers.