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Free Facebook Ads For Small Business
This guest post is written by Molli Megasko
Yes, it’s another Facebook post. But don’t roll your eyes yet (Howie!). I’m not going to talk about the user changes, I’m here to discuss the free ads Facebook is giving to small business.
This January, Facebook is planning to give away $50 in free advertising to 200,000 small businesses across the country to show them how the ad platform works in hopes of return sales and more users. (That’s $10 million in free advertising!)
The social networking site is partnering with both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) to help reach small businesses and educate them on social advertising.
According to the Wall Street Journal,
It is intended to educate small businesses on how to promote themselves on the social-networking site, like buying display ads targeted to specific markets, but also through cost-free measures to engage more with customers.
Beginning now, both organizations, and Facebook employees, will work with the local chapters around the country to start the education process and discuss best practices with small businesses. Currently, 9.2 million pages on Facebook are home to small businesses.
What does $50 get me?
Fifty dollars in advertising might not sound like a lot, but on the Facebook platform, a little can go a long way. According to an updated note on Entrepreneur, businesses interested in receiving the $50 freebie will need to first take out an ad on Facebook starting in January. Then, they will give you $50 worth of credit for clicks.
*Note that the free advertising will be awarded to business owners on a first-come, first-served basis.
Targeting
Besides helping small business become more social and giving them the tools to grow, as we all know, the sweet spot of Facebook is advertising. In fact, most of these changes we are seeing on our interface are to help advertisers become more targeted.
It’s important to know your audience and test out messages and change your images. Just like Google Ads, once you build, they might not come. It’s up to you to keep the ad fresh and know what works and what doesn’t work.
How to set up a Facebook ad
These ads work just like Google AdWords…you pay when people click. The best part about these ads is you know they will be in front of your desired audience.
First you choose the type of ad: A social ad or a Facebook ad.
We suggest small businesses stay with the Facebook ad until their fan base is large enough to move to a social ad (Facebook ads drive traffic to your page, and help increase your fan base). Within the Facebook ad you’ll have choices on targeting. You can target by state, city, gender, age, keywords, workplace, and relationship. Then assign your daily limit of clicks and determine your budget of daily spend.
After your ad is created, our favorite part is the analytics and optimization. Here you can see who viewed your ad, who clicked on your ad, and what actions they took (Facebook formats it into a nice report for you).
This campaign is a great opportunity for small businesses. Not only can you get in front of new audiences and take your products and/or services national, but you can now get free online networking education. For those small businesses not even on Facebook yet, you can see this as free marketing and free advertising, and in an economy like ours, free advertising is a great bonus.
Does your small business run ads on Facebook? If so, what successes have you seen?
UPDATE: If you're an admin for a FB company page, you've probably received the email about the FB Marketing Bootcamp. Registration is free and the first 5,000 to respond get $125 in free advertising.
As the owner of a small business, we discuss Facebook ad's all the time. For the price they "sound" good. However, as a consumer I've NEVER clicked on any of the ad's!! So how good are they? Currently the ad's on Facebook are for "free samples" -which I've only done a couple times and both were disappointing - the other ads are for events in downtown Seattle that don't interest me and I don't live in Seattle! Targeted? Based on interest? Not sure.
CharPennyAnn I agree that a lot of ads are not done correctly, a lot. BUT when done correctly, they can spark clicks to your page, and if you have a special landing page specific for that particular ad, then you might get a conversion.
FB is hosting their first ever Facebook Marketing Bootcamp for business owners. I don't know too much about it now, but the note I have shows up to $125 in free advertising.
MolliMegasko You are right about having a special landing page for the ad, thanks for reminding me of that :) Great information!
I used Facebook ads for one of my site and they are both effective and pretty cheap. And I somehow got them to work way better than Google Ads for me :)
Brankica That's the kind of stuff FB wants to hear.
We have to look at Facebook as a display advertising platform and get over the social aspect of it. That is what Facebook makes money on. The ads work well if you have a pay per click plan but were a bit pricey (I thought) about 28 cents a click. The first add used up $100 quickly (1 day) the second took longer 3 days and it targeted a demographic in los angeles/orange county that was at least a million. No idea how many were served vs clicked on.
I would definitely recommend the free advertising.No different than getting a free Yahoo ad.
HowieSPM Nice perspective, Howie - and one I'm in definite agreement with.
I've had success with this kind of hyperlocal social advertising in the past. We saw a decent conversion rate on with new users coming in through FB ads. That said, I've only ever clicked on ONE Facebook ad (a pre-order for the Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears LP) in the 3+ years I've been on the platform.
Contextual advertising can and does work - but it depends on the nature of the business, of course. :)
jasonkonopinski Nature of the business AND strategic content marketing. ;)
I've tried this for myself as with a number of clients, and have never seen success. The ROI is very low, as compared to other more organic things we've done through Facebook pages. We've done A/B testing and the organic "social" stuff works better.
However I often work partially through the process to see the analytics for a particular client, as Molly mentioned.
The click through rates are so low, I'd be hard pressed to recommend it. I never click on ads, and don't know anyone who does. I think they're going to have to come up with a better system if they want my money. People want social media to be social, not ad-driven.
KenMueller here is an interesting angle Ken. as long as I only have to pay for clicks and not for number of ads served I just care about how many clicks I get and don't care if Facebook has to serve 10,000 just to get 10 clicks for me. But for Facebook that is hard to suck up to the realization that they know less about us than Google or our ISP, much less and thus the other ad networks I think have better data about us since what we actually share on Facebook is such a really small % of our online activity, and even smaller of all our activity.
HowieSPM Howie, how do you figure Google knows more about me than FB? Yes, Google sees the work sites I go to, but FB know what type of movies, music, books, and companies I like. They also know my friends and their interests as well as location and demographics.
KenMueller Ken, I disagree a bit here only because I've clicked on FB ads before. For instance, location-wise, I will click on ads for services in my area to see what they are about. Being in NYC, I love to hear about all the new places.
I also just read that FB is hosting their first ever Facebook Marketing Boot Camp, something worth looking into? Maybe they will give a bit more insight on how to help boost analytics.
I have never seen anyone have success with paid ads on basefook that surpassed simply posting valid info about their business. My clients are all small and local businesses, so my population is skewed, and I only know of 3 that have even tried this result. So I'm not the best example. However, I think that it's probably only best for those looking for a mass audience - ie, something like teevee.
wabbitoid From a marketing perspective, I have not personally worked with any clients on FB ads. But! from a consumer standpoint, it has worked for me; by knowing what music I "like" on FB, I've received ads for upcoming concerts in my geographic area, and have purchased. The ability to specifically target geographically, and based on interests is a great appeal for advertisers that can get that specific. Like you said, Erik, it's not for everyone.
wabbitoid I think if the ads are messaged correctly, not just become a fan of our page, but telling the users exactly what they will get from it and testing and changing that message based on demographics.
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