About a year ago, I didn’t care or desire to be on facebook and until recently not many of my peers were on facebook. Now, it seems everyone is on it. If you are looking for a friend on facebook, just friend me. It is pretty impressive to see a company grow from 0 to 175M registered users in a matter of 5 years and these users are spending an incredible amount of time on the site every month. This leads to a tremendous opportunity for advertisers and entrepreneurs. I admit I haven’t figured facebook advertising out yet, but given the sheer numbers on facebook, it’s only a matter of time before facebook starts becoming extremely profitable. So, for us entrepreneurs, it’s time to start playing the game early before the all the other advertisers arrive.
One of my good pals, DK has a great post on facebook advertising. If you’ve done some facebook advertising with success, please share in the comments below about how you’re thinking about advertising on facebook and what’s worked well. I’m going to share some of the things we’re going to consider trying on facebook. I’m very excited to try this out.
1. Test slowly on a small targeted group. I’m most likely going to target the younger demographic 15-34 since we’re running an entertainment site. Find your group, target age, gender, and location if you need to. Start a campaign on that small group.
2. Measure and Optimize. Watch your results closely and see if you’re driving good, converting traffic. If not, focus on ad copy and your site to make sure it’s converting. CPC’s on facebook are generally cheaper than Google, so you may find some great opportunities to pick up traffic.
3. Consider using CPC as a branding exercise. If you are paying for CPC and you’re getting 0.5% clickthrough, wouldn’t it be great that you would be also getting brand exposure on the other 99.5% of people who don’t clickthrough? Make sure your brand is front and center and that you are doing things that are relevant for the end user.
4. Consider the social impact/virality of ads. If you create a successful campaign, it will get pushed through facebook very quickly with people sharing and talking about your company/product. Find ways to provide value to the end-user and make it easy for them to share your story.
There’s a ton of opportunity right now especially with advertisers staying on the sidelines to be able to purchase advertising much cheaper than in the future which means you can build a business a lot faster now. Facebook is just one of many channels that are going to be huge for driving unique, valuable customers to us. If you figure it out soon, you’ll have a definitive advantage over those who arrive to the party late.
Good luck!
Andy, great thoughts. we may need to chat in the coming weeks/months so i can share a program i am putting together. although if you do figure out fb advertising before me….please let me know when.
darren
Thanks for the comment, I’d definitely want to hear more about your program. Feel free to email me as I’m also trying this out now.
arrrrrrghhhhhhh!
I too was putting off making a profile at any social networking site, and like you 1 yr ago none of my computer geeky friends were on it because we were too busy creating the internet not playing on it (web developers…network engineers).
I been hearing in many blogs from prominent business owners like yourself that fb is a great thing. I guess this is it then huh!
When i create my profile I will look for you and add. thanks!
yeah, I totally agree, it’s amazing how fast the network has grown such that it becomes a detriment if you’re not on it.
Andy, I totally agree, I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Emailing you some more specific questions.
-Francois
it sure doesn’t seem like they’re slowing down anytime soon.
Hey Andy,
I experimented with a bunch of Facebook ads when launching my tutoring site, UniversityTutor.com.
I found them to be cheaper and more effective than Adwords, probably due to less competition (this is disappearing every day though).
I also found that ads which were weird, confusing, intentionally mis-speleld, funny, even insulting and bizarre tended to have better click through rates because this is the culture of Facebook. When I did some facebook ads for a client I came up with some along this vein and they freaked, and wanted more traditional ads. Headline, benefit, call to action. The results were dismal.
An example of what I mean might be this. Typical ad:
Get More Done In Half The Time
This books teaches you to be more productive. Read first two chapters free!
Weird ad:
Do Not Buy This Booky Book!
Unless you are smart enough to understand it’s true potential, it will cause you bodily harm.
I just made that up in two seconds but you get the idea. Can experiment with weird pictures, or hot girls always work too (for both girls and guys). Hope it helps!
Wrote a little more about my experiments here:
http://www.startbreakingfree.com/408/how-to-generate-leads-to-your-new-website/
Brian Armstrong
brian - thanks for the insightful comments. very similar to the launch of facebook apps, it was the dumb ones like throwing sheep that made it - not the real useful ones…
I agree with Brian. The fun thing about facebook is that all the rules are off. I have found ads that are more like how we talk to friends, work much better than the way an ad would appear in a magazine, or typical web copy.
The great thing is that since it is all so inexpensive, you can really have fun with it and experiment. My successes on facebook have come from wild experimentation, and lots of it. (:P)
great comment, i’ll definitely be trying several types of copy and focusing on optimization.
I have had great success using Facebook. I access it many times a day through my webtop and I use it for business and pleasure. I have hooked up with old friends, as well as made new contacts that eventually turned into a job for me.
I have not experimented with their ads yet and that’s something I am definitely interested in.
it does have an addictive nature to it, amazing to see how much the average user spends on facebook a month. always good to strike a balance, unless it’s for business
0 - 175M in 5 years. That’s some number.
Have you seen this video on even more interesting numbers?
“Did you know 3.0″
I too am experimenting w/ FB - and its connection w/ Twitter. With an email list of over 15,000 Seattle yogis - there’s got to be some way to ‘om’ together
For a website like mine it is extremely hard if not impossible to advertise on Facebook or MySpace. I’ve tried multiple times with various types of ads but non of them have been approved.
Any pointers for me?
thanks,
We’ve had very good luck running Facebook advetising campaigns for our clients. Click-through rates have been significantly higher (several ad groups greater than .11% CTR) than Google’s content network, and conversion rates for multiple Facebook ad groups have exceeded 5% (and are 3X the conversion rates from Adwords). We’re working on a case study. If you’re looking for help with your Facebook campaigns, you can contact me at mark@internexperts.com.
Very good article. It’s amazing to see the web change that fast and the role some websites now play in our life. Facebook, twitter and the other become so big, they’ll require their own ad campaigns from advertisers to make sure they reach the whole market. Part of the game is to gather info, and facebook/twitter are just perfect to target the group you’re looking for. I’m not an advertiser myself, but i really can understand why some will leave behind the normal ads and will move there campaigns where they can get a lot more info on the people they advertise to! Very good article, loved it.