Posted on: April 24, 2013
Posted by: Charles Doyle
Categories:
Social Management
Facebook affords small businesses the advantage of raw, direct interaction with their end consumers: the opportunity to spark brand endorsement and encourage feedback in a social setting via mutually sustaining client relationships. Simply put, it’s one of the cheapest, most effective ways to cut through the competition of traditional web advertising and quickly interact with target demographics in local markets.
Nurturing client relationships on Facebook requires an equal balance of creativity and quantitative analysis, but more importantly, a clear understanding of how business pages work hand in hand with the Adverts Manager to collect social data that helps you form relationships with users who are most likely to become customers and/or spread brand awareness.
Facebook’s Adverts Manager uses the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model to charge for using it’s data, giving you flexible payment options that conform to your budget, who your business page is targeting and how you want to reach them. In light of this, the biggest challenge facing brands looking to get heard on Facebook is the sheer complexity of the provided data and how to get the most bang for their advertising buck.
Growing a Facebook fan base requires adapting your company’s voice to appeal to a discerning, previously untapped user demographic (social media members). Eager to get their names out there, many brands starting out on Facebook make the mistake of haphazardly rushing their PPC ads to generate high quantities of “Likes” and give the illusion of having a dedicated fanbase. This shortsightedness is wasteful, however, as the real value lies in customizing and targeting your ads so they’re most likely to be seen by the users who are actually (and actively) seeking your services.
As one of our larger Facebook clients, Bermuda Yellow Pages presented us with a unique challenge when we first took over their page. After years of being known solely as a trusted print directory, their Facebook messaging needed to reflect that they were web savvy and adaptive to the speed of technology as more and more of their clients explored online advertising as an alternative. With a PPC campaign specifically designed to address the individual needs of their advertising clients while also raising awareness of their own brand, we helped them grow their fanbase by over 500% and sustain trust-based relationships with their existing customers. Such successes require market research (knowing your audience), carefully crafted ads, good timing and rich, user-specific data, which Facebook provides in spades.
As they continue to refine the Adverts Manager and expand their user base, Facebook and its data collection process offer ever-increasing value to small business owners seeking more personal interactivity with their brands. With scores of demographic targeting options, low pricing based exclusively on user follow-through/goals achieved and a potential market of over 1 billion people worldwide, experimenting with some PPC is really a no-brainer.
In a future post I’ll explore Facebook’s updated news feed format and how to maximize your business page’s reach if you don’t have a budget for PPC.
Image Credit: SEHabitat
Facebook affords small businesses the advantage of raw, direct interaction with their end consumers: the opportunity to spark brand endorsement and encourage feedback in a social setting via mutually sustaining client relationships. Simply put, it’s one of the cheapest, most effective ways to cut through the competition of traditional web advertising and quickly interact with target demographics in local markets.
Nurturing client relationships on Facebook requires an equal balance of creativity and quantitative analysis, but more importantly, a clear understanding of how business pages work hand in hand with the Adverts Manager to collect social data that helps you form relationships with users who are most likely to become customers and/or spread brand awareness.
Facebook’s Adverts Manager uses the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model to charge for using it’s data, giving you flexible payment options that conform to your budget, who your business page is targeting and how you want to reach them. In light of this, the biggest challenge facing brands looking to get heard on Facebook is the sheer complexity of the provided data and how to get the most bang for their advertising buck.
Growing a Facebook fan base requires adapting your company’s voice to appeal to a discerning, previously untapped user demographic (social media members). Eager to get their names out there, many brands starting out on Facebook make the mistake of haphazardly rushing their PPC ads to generate high quantities of “Likes” and give the illusion of having a dedicated fanbase. This shortsightedness is wasteful, however, as the real value lies in customizing and targeting your ads so they’re most likely to be seen by the users who are actually (and actively) seeking your services.
As one of our larger Facebook clients, Bermuda Yellow Pages presented us with a unique challenge when we first took over their page. After years of being known solely as a trusted print directory, their Facebook messaging needed to reflect that they were web savvy and adaptive to the speed of technology as more and more of their clients explored online advertising as an alternative. With a PPC campaign specifically designed to address the individual needs of their advertising clients while also raising awareness of their own brand, we helped them grow their fanbase by over 500% and sustain trust-based relationships with their existing customers. Such successes require market research (knowing your audience), carefully crafted ads, good timing and rich, user-specific data, which Facebook provides in spades.
As they continue to refine the Adverts Manager and expand their user base, Facebook and its data collection process offer ever-increasing value to small business owners seeking more personal interactivity with their brands. With scores of demographic targeting options, low pricing based exclusively on user follow-through/goals achieved and a potential market of over 1 billion people worldwide, experimenting with some PPC is really a no-brainer.
In a future post I’ll explore Facebook’s updated news feed format and how to maximize your business page’s reach if you don’t have a budget for PPC.
Image Credit: SEHabitat
