With over 1.3 billion users worldwide, Facebook is an essential promotional tool for companies in every industry. Facebook attracts roughly 7x the engagement that Twitter does, when looking at both smartphone and PC usage, in per-user terms. Advertising through Facebook enables your brand to reach a massive audience unlike anything before. The average Facebook user logs in at least 5 times per day, and 47% of Americans say Facebook is their #1 influencer of purchases. It’s easy to see why 70% of marketers used Facebook to gain new leads and promote their products or services.
Promoting Content with Branded Facebook Profile
As of 2013, more than 16 million local business pages have been created – meaning if you haven’t already created a branded profile, stop what you are doing right now and create one. Using a personal Facebook profile as a business page is typically frowned upon, and Facebook Groups have limited functionality as marketing platforms. So, once you create your branded profile, you can now select one of Facebook’s three main locations for your advertised content:
- Newsfeed: This is obviously the most popular of the Facebook advertising placements.These ads show up in a user’s feed along with the content that they see from their friends and the people that they follow.
- Mobile: Facebook has stated that 1.01 billion users log into the social network through their mobile device every month. Ensure that your content is optimized for mobile to reach an even bigger audience.
- Right-Hand Column: This placement can be seen below the “Trending” topics section. The benefit of this placement is that the ad will move down as the user scrolls through their feed. This means maximum visibility for your branded content.
Your brand can share exclusive discounts, seasonal promotions, or industry information through Facebook Ads to encourage followers to make a purchase or build trust with your company.
Target your Followers with Facebook Audience Insights
The more you know about your audience, the more effective your storytelling – and with every successful marketing campaign, understanding your audience means accurately placing your brand in front of users who will act quickly. With Facebook’s Audience Insights, you can measure which type of content is resonating with your Facebook followers. This awesome tool is designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences in order to create and promote better content for the future. You can collect anonymous information such as:
- Demographics: Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size.
- Page likes:The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports.
- Location and language: Where do people live, and what languages do they speak.
- Facebook usage: How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on.
- Purchases activity: Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online).
Advertising on Facebook allows you to reach one of the largest audiences in the world; never before have we been able to reach such a massive following with accuracy and relevance.
Reach Out to Existing Leads Using Facebook Custom Audiences
Audience Insights is a great tool to discover more about your audience and really drill down on promotional efforts for your content while generating new leads. But companies can also use existing leads from their email list to advertise through Facebook. Custom Audiences is a feature offered through Facebook Ads that allows any company to sync up their email list with their Facebook marketing campaigns.
Custom audiences allow brands to target their ads to people that have already established a relationship on or off Facebook. Audiences can be defined by either email address, Facebook UIDs, phone numbers, app user IDs, Apple's Advertising Identifier (IDFA), or Android's advertising ID. When setting up a paid Facebook ad, you can now select them as a “custom audience” in the targeting section of the dashboard using the ads create tool or Power Editor.
Create Mobile Friendly Content Using Power Editor
As mentioned before, the number of mobile Facebook users has skyrocketed in the last 2 years. In fact, 60% of all users log in to Facebook on their phones and/or tablets. This is why it’s so important to optimize your content and ads for mobile in order to reach the broadest audience possible. In order to get your Facebook ads into the main News Feed, you must use the Power Editor.
The “Placements” feature enables you to take any ad and select whether you want it to go to your users’ Desktop News Feeds, Mobile-Only News Feeds, or both. But make the decision carefully, when you choose one or both of these options, your ad will only be seen in the News Feed and not in the right-column.You can choose a separate ad for the right-column, but many marketers have favored the News Feed as it generates much more engagement when compared to right-hand column ads.
Facebook Advertising for Marketing Success
Branded social media profiles have been a proven marketing tool for a few years now – so if your brand has not worked to build a presence through the various available channels – you are behind the game. Not only can social media help gather a larger following and boost traffic, it can directly influences leads and conversion rates for companies in any industry.
Brad Kuenn is a Content Writer, Editor and Strategist living in Nashville, Tennessee, and he provides research, content topics, writing, editing, and content development expertise to clients. He has a passion for writing as well as art, which shines through in his work. His creativity and attention to detail makes him a valuable asset for a wide range of clients. During his time off he enjoys spending time with his wife, family, and his two dogs Brutus and Kane.
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