Most businesses we deal with look at Facebook as an interpersonal social network with a slightly younger than average user, but ultimately we all do business with individuals, and with Facebook fast approaching 1 Billion users there are definite opportunities to engage with clients and prospects via this media.
Facebook Ads is the first feature we thought you should now about. If you log in to Facebook you will have noticed adverts that appear down the right hand side of your page, most of the time advertising things that you will have an interest in. This is because the ad network pulls from your profile information to serve relevant adverts to you. It takes into consideration your generic profile information, the groups that you are part of and the pages you like to make sure they are of interest to you.
As an advertiser this is an incredibly powerful platform. You can create a campaign that is age specific, gender specific, location specific but most importantly profile specific based on your likes and interests. It’s also very cost effective, with Facebook regularly offering incentives on pricing should you advertise your pages within Facebook. We saw a recent case study that saw a charity increase Facebook fans from 400 to over 5000 for a £1400 spend.
When compared to using Google Adwords, we’ve found that we get more clicks for our budget, but over a longer period of time. Due to the additional targeting features in Facebook, you tend to get a higher quality and relevant visitor, which tends to result in higher conversion rates.
Facebook have very recently changed the Facebook Fan Page layout and features, here are the things you need to know if you have a page for your business:
- Timeline structure – the overall page layout has changed to a very similar look and feel to the personal profile timelines.
- Cover Images – the large image at the top of the page which should be used to showcase your business in the best light. There are a few rules though – these must not be text based (i.e no “we have special offers” and must not have any call to actions (i.e “visit our website” or “like our page”).
- Profile Image – smaller than they used to be, these tend to be a company logo.
- News stories – these fill half of the screen, these can be used to showcase news of standard importance. You can create posts and adjust the date, making creating historic posts straight forward.
- Milestones – you can add milestones to your business page to show important events that have happened and are happening within the business. This could be contract wins, new employees or accreditation’s, and milestones are a great way of highlighting good news to your fans – these fill the full width of the screen, making them more prominent than standard news items
- Sticky News posts – you can specify which news posts you wish to appear at the top of your timeline.
- Videos – it’s worth noting that if you wish to add video content to your timeline, if you upload it to Facebook, then the video will appear in the same format as a “milestone” (full width)
- Messaging – if there is one feature you pay attention to, this is it. From now on fans can message you directly which provides a new dynamic when it comes to interacting with customers. You can turn the setting off, so if you have a fan page and don’t really monitor it then we would suggest you disable messaging.
If you would like to chat through whether Facebook advertising could be right for your business just let us know and check out our Facebook Timeline!