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Facebook pages can prove to be a great place for brands, companies, bands, sports people and just about everybody in-between to interact with their clients, customers, fans and followers! However building up an audience isn’t always as straight forward as you may think.

Facebook’s Paid advertising system can work incredibly well when it comes to building your pages’ audience. The advertising system allows you to target Facebook users that you think will be interested in your page, and despite its increasing popularity still remains relatively inexpensive compared to other popular paid advertising platforms! (such as Google Adwords).

Facebook user targeting options:

Facebook Audience
This shows you the user basic targeting options that are available to you. You are able to choose countries, cities, age, gender & interests. For more targeted campaigns, we would always recommend that you take advantage of the “precise interests” option and type keywords that are related to your page. We recently ran a campaign for a rock band and added the more well known bands of the genre as the “precise interests” with great results.

Facebook Advanced Connections
As well as further targeting your audience (such as by relationship status!), you can also look to target friends of those who are already connected to your page, or those who are connected to other Facebook pages that you administrate.

Facebook advert creation

If you have used Google Adwords, the advert creation screen will feel quite familiar. There’s a few differences though as Facebook allows you to use more characters in the Headline & description, allowing for wordier, descriptive adverts.

Facebook Advert
Ad Headline – 25 characters
Ad Description – 90 characters
You also need to add an Image, the dimensions for this are: 100x72px

These adverts will appear on the right hand side of a users news feed. We’d always recommend that you create a few different adverts with different text and images.

Sponsored stories

By default, the sponsored story is also selected, sponsored stories are built around user activity (such as liking a page), this is then shown to a user’s friends either in the sidebar or in News Feed. This can be a great way of generating page likes from friends of those that have already done so, however some users find adverts in their news feed as somewhat intrusive and will be ignored, so their success if far from guaranteed.

Facebook Sample News Story

If you don’t wish to use this feature, you can simply remove it, or you are able to pause it at a later time.

Facebook bidding options:

Much like any standard paid advertising campaign, you can be comfortable knowing that you can set a daily budget that you are happy with, you are also given a few options for optimising your spend.

Facebook Bidding Options

The two more popular are:
Optimise for Impressions – You will be charged every time someone sees your advert or sponsored story.

Optimise For Clicks – You will be charged every time somebody clicks your advert or sponsored story

We have tended to use the “optimise for clicks” option and we’ve found that if the targeting is done well, the clicks will convert into “likers”, especially if there is an incentive for the visitor to do so.
If you choose this option, you can manually set the maximum amount that you are willing to pay for a click, we tend to use an amount which is roughly in between the amounts suggested as a starting point. If the ads aren’t generating impressions, then we simply increase the amount.

Boosting your Facebook page’s posts:

It’s a sad reality that even though your audience have taken the time to “like” your Facebook page, many of them won’t actually see your posts in their news feed. Facebook’s “Edge Rank” algorithm (which in basic terms measures their affinity with your page based on how they interact with it) is part of this reason, as is the frequency that they visit the website.
On average, you may only be able to expect to reach around 20-30% of your audience, if you have something (such as a photo or video), which is “shareable”, or attracts a lot of comments & “likes”, then you will be able to reach more people (as this activity will appear in friends of your audience’s activity feed).
Facebook Boost Story
If you have a story that you want to get to as much of your audience as possible, there is a paid “boost post” (previously referred to as “promote post”) which allows you to create a paid campaign, focusing on your particular post.

Measuring your Facebook campaign:

Facebook Measuring
In this example, our cost per new page like was around $0.20, which is roughly £0.13
Measuring your campaigns in terms of the amount of new page likers is very straight forward thanks to Facebook’s (ever improving!) reporting platform. When your campaigns are running, you can view near live statistics which will show you how many clicks you have received, the cost & the subsequent amount of page “likers”. This also provides you with a “cost per like” column, which is very handy to quickly see how your campaign is working. You can also see the other ways in which the users interact with your page (such as “liking” or “sharing” particular images or posts).
You can also get more detailed information via the “full report option”. Unfortunately this option doesn’t feature the “cost per like” column (at the time of writing), however you can always divide the amount you have spent by the number of page likes to work out your cost per like for the campaign(s).

I can buy 10,000 page likes for $5, should I do that?

The simple answer is no!!. If you opt to use a service that claims to achieve this, you will most likely find that many of the page likes are from fake accounts, or bots which in time will be removed from Facebook. Using this type of service is also against Facebook’s T&C’s, which could see your page removed permanently. Our advice is to always stay away from “deals” like this and instead spend your money targeting real people, who will interact with your page and potentially become clients or customers.

So if you are interested in building your Facebook page’s audience and would like our assistance with your campaign, speak to us!

How can we help?