Facebook advertising – an introduction

The options for Facebook Advertising – promoting your business on Facebook – can be confusing.  Here’s a quick guide.

Facebook has three ad-buying routes for businesses: Online, Inside and Direct.

Online

The Self Service route available to all of us (unlike the next two)

Inside Accounts

Typically for clients spending hundreds of thousands of pounds per year on Facebook. Each client has an account manager to help them buy advertising, but these clients don’t get the detailed personal attention of the Direct, Managed Accounts.

Direct (Managed) Accounts

These are only for the largest brands. Facebook has dedicated teams to deal with huge advertisers and agencies.

Certain Facebook ad products are only available to these managed accounts.

Plain Ads or Social Messages?

Facebook is terrified that too many ‘ads’ will ruin the user-experience, so they’d prefer brands to use “stories,” not “ads”.

Social context (where a friend likes a brand) is much more powerful than simply seeing an ad for the same brand.

Facebook have introduced a number of different formats to encourage advertisers to be more social.  But let’s look first at simple Facebook Advertising.

Marketplace Ads

You can still buy Marketplace Ads, where you supply the ad copy and creative to promote your Facebook Page or your website.  There are four styles:

• Standard Ad (drive people to a site)
• Like Ad (drive people to a Facebook page)
• App Ad (link to an App)
• Event Ad (drive people to an event)

Each ad includes a thumbnail, a title and your words.

New!

The most recent additions to the Facebook advertising options are Page Post Ads and Sponsored Stories.   We’ll come to those shortly.

Sponsored Stories

The power of a social network is in the networks of connections that your fans have.

Imagine the power of your message when it appears endorsed by a friend: someone who’s a fan of your brand. Here’s how someone checking into Starbucks looks in the newsfeed:

And here’s what appears in the right hand ad column when Starbuck choose to promote such natural interactions as Sponsored Stories:

See how it’s possible to click right through to the Starbucks Page in this example.

Sponsored stories are displayed to these “friends of fans” when any of these occur:

• Someone likes your Page
• Someone likes a Post on your Page
• Someone comments on a Post
• Someone uses your App
• Someone shares your App
• Someone checks in at your Location
• Someone answers a question posted on your Page
• Someone says they are attending your Event

You choose which of these you want to use.

The layout and content of the ad depends on type of story.  The “like” stories simply tell someone that their friend has liked a Page. The “post” stories contain more: they tell you what sort of Page information is being shared.

Page Post Ads

This is an ad that contains the same kinds of content that appear on your page.

If someone is not a fan or friend of a fan, they see an ad and can then Like your page from within the Page Post Ad.

Existing fans, and friends of fans, will see a Sponsored Story with the added bonus of also seeing which of their friends are fans.

With a Page Post Ad you can post:

• Text
• A Photo
• A Video
• A Link (to your website for example)
• A Question
• An Event

Offers

The ability to post offers on your page is only available to selected (big) advertisers at the moment, but at some point in the future you should be able to do it. Once someone clicks and claims the offer, their friends will see this in the news feed and they can claim it too.

If you’s like to know more about Facebook Advertising – try this guide from Facebook.

Here’s a video from Facebook that explains Sponsored Stories (it’s where I found the example images above).

Click to play this Facebook video

Aimiable Consulting is a Solihull Social Media marketing company.  Contact us today for expert guidance.