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Advertising on Facebook: Now and the Future – Tiffany Quach
Advertising on Facebook: Now and the Future

Advertising on Facebook: Now and the Future

Facebook is a perfect place for businesses to advertise. With many consumers spending time online nowadays, especially on social media networks, what better way to get noticed than to engage with your consumers where they spend most of their time?

Advertising on Facebook allows your businesses to reach the right people at the right time. It allows for your business to connect with your consumers directly because they are showing interest in the product you produce by “liking”, commenting, sharing, answering polls, and participating in any sweepstakes or contests available on your business’s fan page. Creating ads on Facebook can be set up quickly and is easy to do and is cost-effective. There are many ways to manage your budget – by cost per click (CPC), by clicks per impression (CPM), by a daily budget, or by bidding on a price.

Facebook is incredible in the sense that it creates positive return-on-investment (ROI) for your business. By creating fan pages or events, your ad message can be referred to users who share it with their friends. It’s also a good opportunity to advertise on Facebook because your brand or business can reach over 800 million potential customers. You are even able to target your consumers based on their location, age, and interests that they share to the public.

When your business creates their ads, you can use it to build awareness, drive sales, and grow your fan base. By creating pages, it allows you to connect with potential customers and hopefully it’ll direct traffic to your page. As a business with a fan page, you should constantly talk to your customers whenever they post comments or share exclusive information to them. By doing so, consumers would be more likely to return to your page for additional material or even better, share it with their friends and their friend’s friends. This chain reaction would get your page more attention and it could potentially lead to a sale. Consumers respond positively when their favorite brand shows interest and are willing to answer their questions. It builds more brand loyalty and they can tell their friends that your business/brand has good customer service. It is also easier to track the number of impressions you make than on traditional media. Also, being transparent allows you to share your business with your consumers, by showing them the inner workings of your work with behind the scenes videos, blogs, etc. It also lets you own up to any mistakes or success that you’ve made.

Tide Facebook Fanpage

As stated earlier, having ads on Facebook allow you to target the right people. You can select criteria based on the consumers you’re trying to reach by what they’re interested in. You can target them by:

  • Location
  • Language
  • Education
  • Work
  • Age & gender
  • Birthday
  • Relationship status
  • Likes & interests
  • Friends of Connections
  • Connections

The last two, Friends of Connections and Connections, are fairly new to Facebook. Friends of Connections allows you to target friends of users who are already fans of your page or app. Connections allows for your business to target your ad to current fans with promotional offers in order to gain customer loyalty.

Having a Facebook fan page opens a lot of opportunities like expanding your reach by telling in-store customers to “like” your page, putting a “like” button on your website, run Sponsored Stories and Facebook Ads, and set up check-in deals to offer incentive. You can also utilize social context which is influences consumers’ interests and buying decisions. Social context highlights a user’s friends’ connection with a brand/business, which can be placed alongside their ads. Sponsored Stories is basically word of mouth. Whenever one of your users “likes” your page, interacts with your app, or checks-in to one of your locations, it will show up on their friends’ News Feeds. Using Sponsored Stories is a good advertising format because your consumers’ friends are most likely to enjoy the same things they do and so it increases your business’s awareness and can increase consumer engagement on your page. There are also Sponsored Ads that are also placed on the right side of the users’ News Feed. The ads are synched with any information the users place on their info section of their profile.

sponsored storysponsored ads

When you create an ad, for example, Calphalon pots and pans, you can target based on precise interests or by broad category targeting. A precise interest is as previously stated – targeting your audience by the information they share on their profiles. If you use a “#” in front of any word, it allows you to target any user whose interests are closely related to the word we use, for example, “cooking” will also target “cooking tips”, “cooking and eating”, etc. If you don’t use the “#”, it will only target the word “cooking”. Broad category targeting, on the other hand, targets groups of people who share similar interests related to “cooking”.

Brand awareness and stimulating a purchase is also a plus to Facebook advertising. By being on Facebook, your brand/business is more transparent and open to consumers because there are so many users online and on Facebook that you can build brand awareness. Also, users feel engaged when they can communicate with their favorite brand and that too stimulates brand awareness and loyalty. Advertising on Facebook can also help push consumers to make a purchase. When you post deals, discounts, sales, and other promotions, it gives consumers the incentive to buy a product before the promotions end.

Facebook also had their own analytics platform which allows you to track and optimize the performance of your campaigns in real time. This is a great strength for Facebook because brands and businesses can gain valuable insight on which ads were displayed and which were clicked on. By having this, you can adjust your campaign in order to receive maximum results.

A new advertising format that Facebook could implement is monitoring the number of times a specific user “likes” and comments on your fan page or mentions your brand/business in a post. The more times they participate, they move up a “social ladder” and gain new titles such as “fan”, “obsessed”, “super fan”, etc. The higher their title, you can offer them incentives based on their title status. These titles would also be placed onto their user profile, under a section called “certifications” which would include the brand logo, so that their friends can see that they’re, for example, a “super fan” of Target. Social check-in sites like Yelp and Foursquare have already proven that the social aspect of showing appreciation for a product can be very successful, and by incentivizing the process it can lead to greater returns.

By utilizing this new advertising format, you can garner more traffic to your page because your consumers see a reason to return, the incentives of “leveling up” and gaining new titles. Some of the rewards could be discounts, coupons, prizes, gift cards, or invitations to exclusive events. In order to make sure that the incentives reach the right consumer, your brand/business would have to “gift” them to the consumer.

new facebook format

In a hypothetical campaign for Target, they would be able to implement this new format by posting relevant material on their page. For example, they could put in their status update, “Target is celebrating Easter Sunday!” and include a behind the scenes video of their employees enjoying Easter together. As a consumer, you “liked” the post and commented with a video of your family celebrating Easter. Each “like” and comment is worth one point and in this situation, those were your 100th “like” and comment, which makes you an “official obsessed fan of Target”. As Target uses the Facebook analytics platform, they understand that you are now an obsessed fan and so they make another post on their profile stating “Congratulations Tiffany! We appreciate your love for Target and would love to reward you with a $10 gift card!” Once this is posted, Target would have to “gift” the $10 gift card, which can be a promotional code or printable voucher, to Tiffany and she would also have Target’s photo on her profile page that says she’s an obsessed fan of Target with a number below telling her how many more comments and “likes” she has to give to receive another reward.

By posting that publically on their profile, it makes consumers feel as though they have a relationship with the brand, in this case, Target, because Target acknowledged their consumers. This creates transparency as well as builds brand loyalty because consumers feel special.

References:

http://www.facebook.com/advertising

http://www.facebook.com/business

United States. Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook, Inc. . Washington D.C. , 2012. Web.

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