GM recently pulled out from FB advertising citing non performance and sub optimal ROI on FB advertising. However if you know how to use Facebook correctly, Facebook can be a great advertising platform. Facebook is where Google ads were five years ago. Then you could pick amazing keywords for 10 cents and build your leads quickly. Right now Facebook advertising is still used by a small number of people while everyone and their dog is using Adwords now. Lets look at the most important things you need to keep in mind if you are using Facebook for advertising.
Understand the various advertising types.
Facebook ads can be categorized as Off FB ads (which take you to an external url) and On FB ad (For example for your FB page). If you have a landing or a lead generation page you can use the "external url" ad type and send people to your landing pages. If you have a FB page you can use FB ads to direct people here and to collect likes. Once someone likes your page, stories posted by your page or on your page show up more frequently in their FB timeline. Think of your FB likes as your social email leads list. You can sell them multiple times, until they keep liking your page.
Test everything
Facebook offers many types of advertising options. Sponsored Stories which will show your ad when a user's friend interact with your ad, and Facebook advert which can lead to an external URL or a FB page. There are some demographics which are more comfortable staying on FB and some demographics may like to interact with a real website. Test your adverts and creatives and see what type is giving you the best ROI.
How well can you target your ad?
FB allows you to segment your audience by country, city, age, gender, relationship status, interests and more. Let's say I was looking to hire people for my company. We work with Django and Python technologies. We are based in Hyderabad. So if we segment our ad to city = Hyderabad and Interest is Django or Python, we get 400 people. This is as highly targeted list as you get, not available in any other channel. Even with such accurate targeting your CPC is about 10-15 cents. (However if you segment too narrowly, FB may sometimes reject your ad.)
Optimize your creatives for your segmented target group.
Lets say you are selling Bridal Lehngas. Your target group is Men who would be buying for their to be wives and women who would be buying it themselves for their wedding. A naive approach would be to create one advert. However as FB allows you to segment on gender, you can choose a different creative for men and women. You may even find that some cities prefer a specific style. (FB Allows you to segment on city as well). Again, test everything.
Start small and optimize before you do big ad spends.
The good thing about self server advertising like FB is that they will let you get started with even $50 ad spend. Unlike what GM did, You can test your segmentation and creatives and see that they are ROI positive before starting 10 Million ad spends.
Shabda Raaj is a director and co-founder at Agiliq. They build web apps using Django and mobile apps using Sencha Touch. Their blog talks about technology.
