Facebook Advertising 101: What to Expect and Tips to Get Results

If you’ve been using Facebook to promote your business over the past few years, you’ve certainly seen some changes, most notably that not all of your Facebook fans are seeing your content.

Regular enhancements to Edgerank, Facebook’s algorithm for ranking newsfeed content, have made it almost necessary for businesses to pay for Facebook advertising to reach their audiences.

The Push Towards Paid Facebook Advertising

It’s estimated that Facebook will earn more than $4 billion in revenue just from ad sales this year.

This alone should indicate to you that many business are making the investment in Facebook advertising in order to generate more leads and drive conversions.

If you’ve been a little skeptical to jump on board with paying for advertisements on Facebook, we bring you Facebook advertising 101–what you should expect and tips to get results:

Choose the Right Form of Facebook Advertising For Your Business

For those that are new to Facebook advertising, you should know that you have several different advertising formats to choose from.

You can use Facebook ads to promote your Facebook page, posts on your page, actions taken by your Facebook fans, or your website.

Each of these different types of Facebook ads should serve a specific purpose for your business.

Let’s touch on 3 types of Facebook ads that every small business owner needs to know about:

Use a Right Sidebar Ad to Create Awareness

At a bare minimum, you should take advantage of Facebook’s right sidebar ads to help create awareness for your business.

While these ads are small, they are the least expensive Facebook advertising option available and still allow you to get your content in front of your entire audience.

Facebook recently increased the size of sidebar ads to give them even greater exposure when a user scrolls their Facebook timeline.

Note that sidebar ads have the lowest click-through-rate.

As a best practice, you’ll want to use all of the ad-targeting parameters available with these ads to get the most exposure for your brand.

Use a Boost Post to Boost Your Reach

Facebook advertising offers the ability for your business to turn a post on your page into a short-term advertisement.

This advertising format is ideal if you want to promote a post you know will get high levels of engagement.

Facebook gives you a three targeting options with a boost post: people who like your page, people who like your page and their friends, and people you choose through targeting.

When setting up a promoted post, your business will establish a max budget for the promotion up front, which is tied to a cost per thousand views basis.

Once the budget is met, the promotion will be over.

Take Advantage of Facebook’s Highly Coveted Power Editor

To get the most out of Facebook advertising, use Facebook’s Power Editor for ad creation.

Facebook power editor offers a wide breadth of parameters that you can use to target your ads, such as location, age, gender, interests, connections, relationship status, languages spoken, level of education completed, and workplaces.

Be sure to use interest targeting when targeting your ads.

Typically, businesses experience the best ROI through precise interest targeting, which means they are targeting people based on interests that they listed in their Facebook profiles, pages that they like, and apps that they use.

Include Eye-Catching Images In Facebook Ads

Probably the most important aspect of your Facebook ad is the image that you use.

Be sure to only use high-quality images that will captivate your audience. Consider using a close-up image of an attractive person that would fit right into your target audience.

Another tip is to use images of people facing to the right as your audience will naturally follow the subject’s line of sight, making them more likely to read your ad.

Hopefully, you are excited about all of the opportunities that Facebook can bring to your business. Don’t hesitate to learn about our social media advertising services that include Facebook and other social media platforms.

With so many businesses jumping on board with a paid social advertising strategy, your business simply can’t afford not to give it a try.